Asked during his NATO press conference last week if he would withdraw from the race if polls showed Vice President Kamala Harris doing better against Trump than he was, President Joe Biden told reporters he would only do so if “they [campaign aides] came back and said there’s no way you can win.”
Although upset victories happen sometimes, Biden’s chances of defeating former President Donald Trump are growing slimmer by the day. And Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump may have ended what little hope remained for Biden.
While Trump has multiple paths to victory, Biden has but one narrow path. He must sweep the Blue Wall: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He won all three in 2020.
New York Times columnist Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, has studied recent polling, advertising and campaign spending in the battleground states and concluded that “Biden’s path to re-election has all but vanished.”
In fact, Sosnik has “never seen such a grim Electoral College landscape for Mr. Biden: He not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020, he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”
Trump’s average leads (as per RealClearPolitics) in the battleground states are as follows: Arizona +5.4; Georgia +4.0; Michigan +0.6; Nevada +5.2; North Carolina +5.8; Pennsylvania +5.3; and Wisconsin +2.6. Trump’s leads in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania exceed the margins of error and his lead is close to the margin of error in Georgia. Except for North Carolina, Biden won all of these states in 2020, albeit narrowly.
Additionally, with recent polls showing Trump tied with Biden in Virginia and Minnesota and gaining momentum in other blue states, Trump may be on the verge of expanding the electoral map for Republicans.
Sosnik believes that even such traditionally blue states as Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and even Nebraska’s Second Congressional District which Biden won by 6 points in 2020, could become competitive. He stressed that “[u]nless the basic contours of the race change and some of the Sun Belt battleground states become more competitive (which is unlikely), Mr. Biden’s only viable path for winning is to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
Prior to Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, Trump’s average lead was 0.2% in Michigan, 2.8% in Pennsylvania, and the two were tied in Wisconsin. Trump has more than doubled his margins in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and is now leading in Wisconsin by 2.6%.
Politico reported last week that a super PAC tied to Miriam Adelson, the widow of billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, will be spending “$61 million on TV and digital ads attacking Biden” in these three states.
Sosnik notes that Biden has visited Pennsylvania 10 times so far this election cycle and his campaign has outspent Trump “on network television ads by a margin of over two to one” in the last month.
Michigan, he explains, “is near the bottom third of states in the country when ranked by the percentage of people with college degrees.” Trump typically outperforms among voters without college degrees. He also points out that “inflation has hit Michigan working-class voters hard and influenced their views of the economy and the election.” The Israel-Hamas war is also hurting Biden with Arab voters in the state.
Finally, Sosnik reminds us that the presence of third-party candidates was “decisive” in Trump’s 2016 victory and that the inclusion of independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein on the ballot this year could give him a boost.
Referencing Sosnik’s analysis in a Friday op-ed, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that he “usually surfaces every four years to assure Democrats they’re going to win. But this week he showed up in the New York Times to say Mr. Biden has only a single, narrow path to victory in the Electoral College.”
Clearly, if the election were held today, Biden would lose. His chances of victory in even one of these must-win states is slim, and his odds of a trifecta, almost nil. But, of course, the election is not being held today, and there may be shocks ahead that none of us can predict.
According to Axios, a loose-knit group of Democrats, whom the outlet calls the “unofficial Committee to Unelect the President,” is “plotting hourly” to force Biden out of the race, “the sooner, the better.” Axios reports that this group is “growing by the day” and is “circulating polls showing Democrats would shoot from sure losers to big winners with a new ticket.”
As per Axios, this network includes: former Obama aides (Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod; former Clinton advisers (James Carville); Democratic lawmakers; swing-seat Democrats; big donors; late-night liberals (Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart); New York Times opinion writers (Tom Friedman and Nick Kristoff); and “Biden aides busily leaking.”
On Friday, the New York Times reported that donors to the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, have put a hold on pledged donations of $90 million until Biden agrees to step aside.
Although it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump may have tossed Biden a lifeline, at least temporarily. And he has grabbed it.
As far as Trump supporters are concerned, the longer Biden hangs on, the better.
A previous version of this article appeared in the Washington Examiner.
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