By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday,
February 06, 2024
Last
week, I set out my basic theory of the case on how the
general election will go: It will be extremely tight, but Biden remains
slightly favored because I expect the race to turn on the decision educated
surburbanites make, and they loathe Trump. I also added that economic
perceptions among this group could likely shift soon given the stabilization of
inflation and the booming jobs market recently. Then, this weekend, Rich Lowry
mischievously laid a hex upon me by asking, in public, “Is Jeff Blehar Wrong?”
You
must never underestimate my ability to defeat Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, because immediately after
Rich wrote that NBC News dropped a truly nightmarish poll on Joe Biden on
Sunday. Trump leads nationally among registered voters by 47–42, a five-point
gap that is in many ways the least of Biden’s problems.
Far
worse are the issue questions beneath the topline, where the president is
currently being slaughtered by Trump on nearly every single issue that matters to voters: Trump
leads on the economy 55–33, on the border by 57–22, on crime 50–29, and on
competence/effectiveness (a proxy for Biden’s age issues) 48–32. Biden leads
Trump on abortion, but by a worrisomely slim 44–32 margin given Democrats’
typical dominance on the issue and Trump’s involvement in making Dobbs possible.
And most inconceivably of all, on the issue of “protecting democracy” (itself a
proxy for Trump’s key weakness), Joe Biden leads Donald
Trump by all of 2 percent, 43–41.
Clearly,
the American people aren’t yet feeling the “vibe shift” that many economists
and observers (as well as white-knuckled Democratic partisans) were predicting
would quell voter anger about inflation. (There are many possible reasons for
this, all of them happily outside the bailiwick of this piece.) Can this new
disastrous poll for Biden still be reconciled with a general-election scenario
where he wins the popular vote running away while edging out a 2020-like
Electoral College victory? It is certainly possible. The question entirely
turns on how many of those registered voters become actual voters.
What few polls this far out we have with “likely voter” screens — as opposed to
the far broader “registered voter” filter — show that Biden’s severe
disadvantage in present polling turns into a tie or even a narrow advantage
when only those who voted in both 2020 and the 2022 midterms are considered.
(Recall the New York Times/Siena poll which showed Trump leading by
two among registered voters but trailing by two among likelies.)
So
perhaps my belief that Biden is favored remains intact. (Will a bankrupt
Trump/RNC be able to get low-propensity voters out to cast their ballots?) But
I am haunted by doubt, and reminded of something else both impossible to
quantify properly and impossible to ignore: Donald Trump’s tendency to
outperform his polling numbers when on the ballot. There is an intelligent
argument to be made that 2016 was not the “polling miss” people treat it as,
while 2020’s closeness was a genuine surprise in many states; in both cases,
however, the surprise was in Trump’s favor and not his flaccid Democratic
opponent’s. Perhaps, as Democrats and anti-Trumpers aver, it will be different
after January 6 and the sexual-assault award and his various legal travails.
But perhaps not.
Because
far too many people — myself included — seem to confidently “know” that Donald
Trump permanently disqualified himself from the presidency with enough voters
to narrowly reelect Joe Biden. What this piece presupposes is, maybe
he didn’t. (Again, consider the staggeringly close answer on the
“Protecting Democracy” issue question. It doesn’t reflect mere ignorance or
stubborn denial about January 6 on the part of respondents — there is a
counterargument in there as well.) Given how Trump has outperformed his
expectations at least twice on record, and given his continuing advantage in
swing states polls versus national ones, it makes sense to think about the very
specific states where this race will be decided, and why even a comfortable national polling
lead might not be enough.
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