Spooked by the results of a Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday night that showed former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in head-to-head matchups in six of seven battleground states, the Biden team took immediate action: they hired new pollsters.
Politico reported on Wednesday that the Biden campaign hired eight veteran pollsters “to lead its number-crunching operation.” The outlet explained that “[t]he expansion of Biden’s polling team comes at a complicated moment, given Biden’s stubbornly low approval ratings and pollsters’ struggles to measure the electorate accurately in the past two presidential races.” It’s unclear how adding to their stable of pollsters will help make the president more popular.
The new hires arrived hours after an uncomfortable moment for First Lady Jill Biden. Asked about the Wall Street Journal poll during an interview on “CBS Mornings,” she insisted: “[Biden is] coming up. He’s even [with Trump] or doing better. So, you know what, once people start to focus in and they see their two choices, it’s obvious that Joe will win this election.”
Is it?
The Journal survey also asked voters which candidate was better equipped to handle the top issues. On the economy, 54% chose Trump compared to 34% for Biden. On immigration and border security, Trump prevailed by a margin of 52% to 32%. Asked which candidate had the “mental and physical fitness needed to be president,” 48% picked Trump and just 28% chose Biden. Naturally, voters felt that Biden was better able to handle abortion by a margin of 45% to 33%.
This is especially bad news for the Biden campaign considering that, throughout the 2020 election cycle, Biden consistently led Trump in most swing state polls. In early April 2020, Biden led Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of battleground state polls by 2.3%. And, seven months later, on the eve of the 2020 election, Biden’s lead stood at – drumroll please – 2.3%. At no point during the 2020 election cycle did Trump prevail in this average.
Still, it’s impossible to predict any black swan events that might occur between now and November, so we can only consider what’s in front of us. None of it looks good for the president.
For starters, we know that Biden’s diminishing mental cognition will not improve and may grow worse.
And, although the year-over-year rate of inflation growth has slowed, we know that prices are still up more than 18% across the board since Biden took office and are unlikely to come down. We also know that the Federal Reserve Bank’s aggressive interest rate hikes (necessary to rein in the record inflation caused by the Biden administration’s reckless spending) have more than doubled mortgage interest rates.
The primaries showed us that voters – even Democrats – are extremely concerned about the border crisis. As cities across America strain to absorb the influx of 8 to 10 million illegal immigrants, the crisis has become impossible for voters to ignore.
But Democrats love their abortions and they’re hoping that their ardent support for “reproductive freedom” and “women’s health” will trump other issues as it did in the 2022 midterms. Some pundits are optimistic that red states, including Florida, could be in play after the state’s Supreme Court ruled this week that a six-week abortion ban can go into effect on May 1. It’s unlikely, but we’ll see.
Democrats are also desperate for a conviction on at least one of the 88 criminal charges against Trump to sink him. Although they may yet get a conviction (Trump is most vulnerable in New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case), court delays in most of the cases threaten to push the trials out beyond Election Day.
But would a Trump conviction actually matter? What if a large swath of voters, particularly independent voters, well aware of the illegitimacy of the charges and the party’s hijacking of the U.S. system of justice, stand behind him?
Meanwhile, Biden’s job approval, as per RealClearPolitics, sits at 41.2%, which is problematic for an incumbent president seeking reelection. According to Gallup, presidents with an approval rating of 50% or higher are “a safe bet for reelection.” (The two former presidents with approval below 40%, George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, lost their bids for reelection.) Gallup adds that, historically, “approval ratings have not changed much between June and Election Day.”
With all due respect to Politico, there’s really nothing complicated about the moment at all, at least nothing that eight new crackerjack pollsters can fix. The problem for Biden’s campaign is actually quite simple: Biden has been a terrible president and many voters don’t feel better off now than they did four years ago.
A previous version of this article appeared in the Washington Examiner.
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