Don't panic, but...
There's plenty of time until Election Day, but a new poll should be making Democrats very nervous.
Happy Monday!
I am posting that Garfield comic strip because (a) it’s Garfield and I shouldn’t need a reason, and (b) the situation illustrated above is very much what the latest NBC News polling results felt like:
Despite a growing economy and little opposition for his party’s nomination, President Joe Biden confronts a dissatisfied electorate and a challenging political climate nine months before he faces re-election, according to a new national NBC News poll.
Biden trails GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on major policy and personal comparisons, including by more than 20 points on which candidate would better handle the economy. And Biden’s deficit versus Trump on handling immigration and the border is greater than 30 points.
The poll also shows Trump holding a 16-point advantage over Biden on being competent and effective, a reversal from 2020, when Biden was ahead of Trump on this quality by 9 points before defeating him in that election.
And Biden’s approval rating has declined to the lowest level of his presidency in NBC News polling — to 37% — while fewer than 3 in 10 voters approve of his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
All together, these numbers explain why the poll shows Trump leading Biden by 5 points among registered voters in a hypothetical 2024 general-election matchup, 47% to 42%. While the result is within the poll’s margin of error, the last year of polling shows a clear shift.
If the election were being held tomorrow, I'd say that Joe Biden's Goose is well and truly cooked. And the rest of the Free World would be kind of screwed too.
I can sort of maybe possibly come close to understanding the “economy” numbers. For most of Trump’s Presidency the economy was doing very well and - more importantly - without the inflation which has blighted the past few years, and even the most anti-Trump commentators (like, well, me) must concede that the crash in early 2020 would have happened no matter who was in office once the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Some of these other numbers are straight out of Bizarro World, though:
Trump beats Biden on “improving America’s standing in the world” and “protecting democracy.” I…I…I got nuthin’.
But it's actually the numbers for minority voters which really jumped out at me:
An under-discussed story of the 2020 election was that Donald Trump actually increased his share of the vote among several minority communities, including some overwhelmingly Latino districts near the US-Mexico border. And now he is effectively tied with Joe Biden among Hispanic voters.
It illustrates yet again, that the Latinx vote is far from a monolith. (The very existence of the word “Latinx” may partly explain why.) Many of these voters are socially conservative and much angrier about illegal immigration than you might have expected.
If anything, the most stridently anti-illegal-immigration voters are those who navigated America’s Kafkaesque immigration system to legally move to the country.
Mind you, a unified “Hispanic” vote is a myth in the first place. There are absolutely massive ideological and cultural differences among people who came to America from different Latin American countries, and many of them frankly don’t think much of the others.
As for African-American voters, Biden still holds a substantial lead. But if Trump somehow manages to hang on the 16% support revealed by this poll, that would be the best performance for a GOP Presidential nominee in decades.
How can the man who met with Nick Freaking Fuentes be doing well among Black voters (at least by Republican standards), and the man who launched his campaign by accusing Mexico of sending rapists and criminals to America (though some of them were probably good people) be statistically tied for the lead among Hispanics? Never underestimate how much those who feel completely disaffected and left behind want someone who, if he can’t really improve their lives, will at least give them a show.
Of course, we still have nine months to go before the election, and it is not uncommon for an incumbent to be far behind at this stage - or even later - in the campaign, only to go on and win.
Obama was neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in the fall of 2012, and even trailed him for a while. Gallup’s last poll before Election Day had Romney ahead by a point, which might be part of the reason you never hear about Gallup anymore.
And George H.W. Bush, who might as well have been an incumbent after eight years as Reagan’s VP, was down 17 points to Michael Dukakis at one point during the summer of 1988.
Yes, I know there are many key differences between 2024 and 2012, much less 1988. Trump is a known quantity, and the passage of time has worn down the bad memories many voters might have had of his term in office.
But that could work both ways. As the campaign really gets going and people start paying attention, all of these bad memories may come back.
Like I’ve said over and over: don’t assume Trump can’t win, and don’t assume he is somehow destined to win. And don’t assume there are any voters, even seemingly ultra-MAGA deplorables, whose minds cannot be changed:
U.S. Capitol riot defendant Pam Hemphill posted a video on Saturday announcing her vote for President Joe Biden in South Carolina's Democratic primary.
Hemphill, who served two months in prison in 2022 as part of a plea agreement for her actions during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, stressed the importance of voting in her video posted to X, formerly Twitter.
A native of Boise, Idaho, and now a resident of Summerville, South Carolina, Hemphill voted in her new state's "First in the Nation" Democratic primary on Saturday. Biden won in dominant fashion with 96.2 percent of the vote, followed by author Marianne Williamson at 2.1 percent, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota at 1.7 percent.
"If we could just do our part. Don't think your voice doesn't count. And your vote counts very much. What you have to say, and how you vote, will count," Hemphill, 70, said, who closed the video by saying, "God Bless You. God Bless America. And God Bless Joseph Biden."
Hemphill told Newsweek via text message on Saturday night that she plans to attend Nikki Haley's rally on Sunday in Charleston, South Carolina. However, she said she still plans to vote for Biden in November's general election.
That "poll" is 1,000 people with landlines. Who answer the phone. That means it skewed Auld, and is well inside Faux Snooze territory, where the economy of the United States is worse than it was on Black Thursday 1929. There was a far better poll released on January 31 from Quinnipiac of 10,000 respondents including cell phones - in which Biden was leading Trump 50-42.
Anyone who read the Jobs Report on Friday, which shows 3.1 million new jobs in 2023 (compared to Trump's 1.6 million 2017-2021), knows these people in this clickbait poll live in "cloud cuckoo land" to be polite.
We are now at the point with cable news and legacy TV news that they are so desperate for viewers as they circle the drain of viewing relevance that they have been caught "cooking the books" because the algorithm that works for them is the one that works for FleeceBlock: get people upset and agitated, and they'll come back for more.
The wholesale housecleaning needed in this country - starting with sending a few of the Silly Con Valley bros to prison for their bullshit - would take 50 years without having to put up with what used to be the Republican Party.