About that NYT poll...

It's real. It's also a year out.

Source: New York Times

I have a piece up at the Los Angeles Times today about that recent New York Times / Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in 5 out of 6 swing states. The TL/DR version is that the poll should be treated critically but seriously:

• A poll is a snapshot of the way things are now, not a forecast of what will happen a year from now.

• Republicans are in campaign / defend Trump mode right now, while Democrats are in messy-act-of-governing mode, and so this is not highly reflective of what the electorate will look like a year from now. That said…

• It’s a solid poll, and a similar poll in 2019 called the 2020 extremely closely, but…

• I am extremely skeptical that Trump and Biden are tied among the under-30 electorate or that Trump will pull 22% of the Black vote.

Anyway, I do encourage you to read the whole thing. But I have a few other thoughts on this matter!

First of all, the NYT article on the poll, like many such articles, includes a number of quotes from prospective voters meant to illuminate the numbers. These quotes are bizarre. To wit:

“The world is falling apart under Biden,” said Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist in Bloomsburg, Pa., who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 but is now backing Mr. Trump, albeit with some reservations. “I would much rather see somebody that I feel can be a positive role-model leader for the country. But at least I think Trump has his wits about him.” […]

“I actually had high hopes for Biden,” said Jahmerry Henry, a 25-year-old who packages liquor in Albany, Ga. “You can’t be worse than Trump. But then as the years go by, things happen with inflation, the war going on in Ukraine, recently Israel and I guess our borders are not secure at all.”

Now Mr. Henry plans to back Mr. Trump.

“I don’t see anything that he has done to benefit us,” said Patricia Flores, 39, of Reno, Nev., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but won’t support him again in 2024. […]

“I don’t think he’s the right guy to go toe to toe with these other world leaders that don’t respect him or fear him,” said Travis Waterman, 33, who worked in home restoration in Phoenix. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but sees him as “weak” now and prefers Mr. Trump.

I could pick these apart, but these are just a reminder of what we have learned from Chris Achen & Larry Bartels, the authors of The American Voter, and many other scholars: most voters do not follow politics closely or have terribly well informed ideas about public policy. They can form opinions about the way things are going in the country — based roughly on the economy, war, their personal situations, and other factors — and if they don’t like it, they’ll blame the incumbent president. And then they just project that onto other areas of the president’s performance and personality. That’s how we get from “I’m unhappy about high prices and virus outbreaks” to “Hamas attacked Israel because Joe Biden is old.”

Moreover, just generally, voters tend to have real opinions about politics but are notoriously bad at understanding how they arrived at those opinions. Take the numbers seriously, but not the quotes.

Second, just what are Democrats supposed to do with this information? Michael Tomasky has a thoughtful piece on the poll, but concludes by saying:

Democrats need to have some tough conversations. They either need to bridge that chasm—figure out ways to explain to voters that Biden has been better than they think and that he’s fit to serve another term—or they need to start thinking about whether they have to change captains before it becomes unbridgeable.

I’m not sure what value lies in explaining. I mean, if unemployment and inflation are low and economic growth is strong and people still don’t believe it, is better salesmanship really going to change anything?

And on Tomasky’s second point, what exactly does changing captains look like? Who is this magical Democrat who removes all doubts, and how does this person convince the ambitious and successful president (the one person on the planet who has beaten Donald Trump in a general election, btw) to slide into retirement?

As I wrote here,

If somehow people convinced Biden to bow out (or if it became medically necessary for him to do that), what would that look like? He would probably pledge his support to Vice President Harris, but that wouldn’t end the discussion. She would get challenged because Democrats are also concerned that she’s not electable. So then Pete Buttigieg likely jumps in, and then maybe Amy Klobuchar, and then maybe a host of governors (Gavin Newsom? Jared Polis? Gretchen Whitmer?). And whoever emerges from that Thunderdome will… likely end up polling around the same as Biden did against Trump.

Also, for what it’s worth, the tactic of pushing an unpopular incumbent president aside for a different nominee in order to win the general election has, at least since the Civil War, a zero percent success rate. Check in with Presidents Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey on that one.

I don’t have any particular great strategy advice for Democrats, except to say that their team is already on the field, it has won before, and it can win again. But no, there are no sure things in this line of work.