Can Biden Win in November?
July 17, 2024
Brooklyn, Wednesday morning, July 17th. I apologize for going dark for a week after the UK and French elections, but I needed some time off and was visiting family on Cape Cod. I really didn’t pick a good week to take off considering the political news in the US. However, I am not sure there is going to be any good week to take off the rest of this year so we all better take some rest when we can get it. Today, I am turning back to the US general election and the next few posts will consider the state of the race and what the polling is telling us about Biden’s chances in November. Today’s post is somewhat of an introduction to a more data-heavy post or two that will follow this up.
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The most important political question Democrats have been asking for the past three weeks is: can Biden win in November? The short answer is “yes, but…”
As they say, you can disregard everything that is said before “but.” While Biden can still win, there is no good reason at the moment to think he will. And there is reason to be concerned that not only will he lose, but he will drag down Senate and House candidates with him leading to a bloodbath for Democrats in November. The consequences of an authoritarian, revanchist party supported by fascist street gangs who already attempted a coup controlling all branches of government cannot be understated.
Three weeks out from a debate is perhaps past the point where we should see if it moved the needle in any direction rather than created some temporary immediate reaction movement. Debates, like conventions and vice presidential picks, can cause immediate bumps in support for one candidate that dissipate once the event fades. They can also cause loss in support for a candidate who performs poorly. There is no question Biden’s debate performance damaged his candidacy. What it did not really do is help Trump’s standing. That is, Trump’s support was not significantly any different after the debate than it was before it.1 The race remains close. But not only that, a Marist poll that hit last Friday had Biden +2 in a two-way race (he is losing by one point in a multi-candidate race). This suggests Biden could still win. It also suggests any Democrat can win. There is nothing in the polling that suggests that Biden is the only candidate who can beat Trump or even that he’s the strongest.
Speaking of event bumps, Trump got his all in one long weekend with his VP pick, the convention opening, and an assassination attempt. Despite very real panic I heard from Democrats I talked to about how the shooting will seal the election for Trump, I doubt that it – or any of the other big political events this week – will. There are not a lot of data points on assassination attempts, but they appear to do little to help a politician outside of a brief and illusory bump in the polling. Reagan was shot just two months after he was inaugurated in a much less polarized time, and his eight-point bump in his approval ratings lasted only a few weeks. The two attempts on Ford’s life in 1975 did nothing to help him politically. And while a lot of people point to Teddy Roosevelt making a speech after he was shot in the 1912 election, he went on to lose that election. I doubt picking Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and what so far has reportedly been a boring Republican convention will do much to help Trump in the polling either. In fact, nothing much seems to be able to change how close this election appears to be.
The only thing that has moved the needle in the past ten months was the debate. Trump opened up a 2.5 point lead over Biden in the 538 polling average in the week afterwards; however, it is slowly coming back down. This morning, Trump’s polling average lead was 2.0 points. This helps Biden supporters to maintain that the president is not just able to win in November, he’s the only one who can. There is no polling support for either conclusion at the moment. We may know why Biden insists there is no polling evidence for the conclusion he cannot win. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that since the debate Biden has shrunk his circle of advisors to his family and a couple of longtime, close confidants. He is not looking at any polling, but getting conclusions from a friend who used to do polling. It feels like Biden has created an environment around himself to only hear what he wants to hear.
Before looking at what really counts – battleground state polling – let’s take a look at why Biden supporters might believe he can win and whether that makes sense.
The argument from experience. There are at least two prongs of this argument. One is that he has been a very good president. The other is that he comes back when people count him out. There is a third – that he’s been in government for 50 years, but there are political drawbacks to making that specific argument. People aren’t exactly enamored with lifelong politicians, and it reminds voters how old he is.
“I’ve gotten more done than any president has in a long, long time in 3½ years. So I’m willing to be judged on that.”
Biden has indeed accomplished a lot in his short presidency, perhaps more than anyone else has since FDR, considering the kind of opposition he has had. This is usually a good reason to re-elect a president. However, it is not true in a vacuum. Context matters. There is, of course, the reward reason to run a president who has done well. That president deserves reelection, right? But there is also the political reason to run a president who has done well. In normal times, that president should be reelected. If a party wants to hold onto the White House, why would they not run an accomplished president for reelection? These are not normal times and whether we like it or not, a president as accomplished as Biden is also very unpopular. Elections are about the future, not the past. In politics, accomplishment does mean much if it doesn’t translate into electoral success.
While Biden and his supporters may think he deserves reelection, the electorate may be at a very different place. And not just because he is unpopular, but because there is a yearning to break free of the same generation of politicians – who are usually white men – making decisions. Not a few young folks blame this generation and the ones before it for the wicked problems they are faced with having to solve in their lifetimes. In fact, that may explain why Biden is unpopular among some parts of the electorate.
But Biden’s experience and accomplishments do not matter in terms of electability. This is not an argument for why Biden can win; it is a persuasion argument for undecided or pliable voters. It tells us nothing about whether Biden can win this year, even if in normal times it would. It is backward-looking, and the election is in the future.
The other prong of this argument is that Biden is some kind of comeback kid. People count him out and then he proves them wrong. Frankly, I find this embarrassing. It makes Biden sound incredibly insecure - like he has something to prove and he’ll stay in just to stick it to whoever doesn’t believe in him. It comes off as selfish and disengaged from what the actual consequences are if he loses, in my opinion. But it is also not true, in a number of ways.
First, Biden may have won in 2020, but he lost three earlier campaigns for president. If Obama had picked Even Bayh instead of him in 2008, Biden would never have been president. His elected political career would have been over. This comeback kid thing is part of his own mythology about his upbringing, and it may also be intentionally evoking Bill Clinton’s comeback in the 1992 primaries - although I doubt if anyone under 55 has any idea of what that means.
One thing Biden supporters are referencing is how he was on the path to losing the 2020 Democratic nomination until he won a convincing victory in the South Carolina primary. This probably had more to do with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) than Biden, but it doesn’t really matter. The argument is that when Biden is down, he always comes back and wins. (But see his three earlier presidential campaigns.)
The second reason this comeback kid argument is not true is that it cannot be true. That is, Biden cannot keep winning forever and even if he did, there is no inevitability to it - and thus one can not rationally plan around it. Maybe he pulls out a victory in November - as I have suggested, it is not impossible - but maybe his luck runs out instead. When Muhammad Ali came out of retirement to fight Larry Holmes for the heavyweight title, a lot of boxing commentators picked Ali because of the same “comeback kid” rationale. He suffered a terrible beating, to the point a concerned and embarrassed Holmes asked the referee to stop the fight. We can be seduced by a good narrative, and the comeback kid is a good narrative. But it has absolutely no predictive value.
There is one thing that may help Biden that is related to this narrative. He has started campaigning stronger and more populist since calls for his withdrawal began. He has released some campaign promises designed to excite the base - such as Supreme Court reforms (although some might start to questions why he did nothing about that before now). If his own comeback kid narrative makes him a better candidate, that could definitely help Biden. But the ironic thing about that is there is no evidence he was going to campaign like this until people called for him to withdraw. If his newfound campaign energy translates into a win at the polls, one might fairly conclude that the calls for withdrawal helped - rather than hindered - his victory. Perhaps the lesson of this might be that even incumbent presidents should undergo competitive primaries.2
The argument from the data. Looking at data is the best way to understand whether there is a path to victory. Polling is the best data we have, but there are other ways to understand how elections might turn out, including focus groups and looking at economic and geopolitical events.
Claiming that the data shows Biden can win is problematic because a lot of his supporters are not being honest about the polling. Biden’s army of social media influencers has been cherry-picking the polling, misinterpreting the data, and attacking anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a disappointing – and frankly, a little scary – that so many of these folks on social media have just decided to use MAGA tactics to shout down dissenting opinions. That’s the subject for a different conversation. Here, the phenomenon is relevant because the data is not good for the president and the folks saying so are not being honest about it - and that is being amplified in social media.
However, many folks are misunderstanding the data rather than being dishonest about it. Perhaps the biggest source of misunderstanding is the 538 election projection. This shows that Biden has a 54% chance to win the election in November. This projection is exciting to folks who might otherwise be concerned that Biden cannot win because it projects the actual winner of the election, not just the winner of the popular vote. So this is good for Biden, right? Actually, it isn’t.
The projection is the result of a model that includes different inputs. At this point in the campaign the 538 model relies heavily on “fundamentals” – things like the state of the economy, how presidents have fared in the past under similar circumstances, etc. Polling is an input, but it is not nearly as influential in the projection as one might assume. The polls-only projection, which 538 thinks is not very helpful to project the election at this point in the campaign, has Biden with a less than 30% chance to win. Roughly 20 points is how much the fundamentals favor Biden, and all he can do is manage an even chance to win.
Now, 30% is not nothing. You may recall that the final 538 projection in 2016 gave Trump about a 20-30% chance to win, and he did. At that point in the campaign, 538’s projection relies mostly on the polling so it is not really an apples-to-apples comparison. And while 30% is not a small probability, it is axiomatic that the person with the 70% chance of winning is more likely to win than the one with the 30% chance. Clinton’s loss is currently the exception that proves the rule.
The other thing about the polling that people often misunderstand is actually related to a misunderstand of how we elect presidents and how that system is skewed to favor rural voters (who largely support Republicans these days). After 2016, it is hard to believe that most people don’t have at least a basic understanding of this. There are resources for you to brush up on it - here is a good one - so I am not going to explain it except to say that an even race at the national level almost certainly means a Republican victory – perhaps a significant one – in the Electoral College. This is why a Trump lead in the national polls is a serious problem for Biden. The president needs to be leading by at least 2 points for the polling to signal a potential Democratic victory in November. In fact, while the 538 election projection gives Biden a 54% chance to win in November, the projected victory is a 2.6 point margin. But even that won’t really help us, because what matters is the vote in battleground states – those states that could plausibly be won by either party and in some combination provide a path to victory for one of the candidates.
Let’s assume Marist is correct and Biden is up by two points. Let’s also assume that it will be a two-person race by the time we start voting. Considering the large vote totals the president should be able to ring up in places he cannot earn additional electoral votes, like California, New York, and Illinois, this close of a popular vote win is unlikely to get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to win. There is a highly unlikely - but possible - scenario where Biden squeaks victories in enough battleground states while doing worse (but not losing) in solid Democratic states and comes out with 270 electoral votes. If this happens, it is actually possible for Biden to win while losing the popular vote. But it is this kind of thinking which blurs our thinking.
When we focus our attention on the outlier possibilities we ignore what is most likely to happen. The polling right now - even Marist’s - tells us Biden would lose if the election were held this week. In deciding on whether it makes sense for Biden to withdraw or not, we have to start with what is likely, not what is barely possible. Perhaps Trump’s 2016 victory clouds our thinking on this and lets us wander too much into the land of make-believe. If he can do something folks didn’t think was possible, maybe Biden can too? Well, the problem is that can happen. But it almost certainly won’t happen.
That’s the set-up for digging into the battleground state polling. In my next post – hopefully tomorrow, but it is a travel day for me so perhaps on Friday – we’ll look at this polling and see what it is telling us about the chances for a Democratic victory in November.
There appears to be a ceiling of support for Trump and a floor of support for Biden (and perhaps any Democratic nominee). This can provide a Democratic path to victory this fall despite the current polling. I will expand on this in one of the follow-up posts.
Perhaps if we focused campaigns on ideas rather than one what’s bad about one’s opponent, competitive primaries would be beneficial to everyone - including the incumbent who has to make the case for reelection with their own party.