This week, the Cook Political Report shifted two battleground states to "Toss Up" in light of recent polling showing Biden not performing well in those states. The latest report acknowledges that Biden's dismal approval ratings in the FiveThirtyEight polling average make it “hard to justify keeping two battleground states — Nevada and Michigan — in the Lean Democrat column.”
More from The Hill:
Biden won a majority in both states back in 2020, but the president “isn’t performing any better either in job approval or in head-to-head matchups with Trump in those states than in the other battleground contests,” writes CPR’s Editor-in-Chief Amy Walter.
Nevada and Michigan now shift to join Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as “toss up” states for next year’s presidential race.
As Biden campaigns for another four years in the White House — heading toward a possible 2024 rematch with former President Trump, the Republican front-runner — he’s been plagued by poor poll numbers.
In Nevada, Biden’s “weak standing with Latino and younger voters has outsized repercussions,” Walter said.
In Michigan, Biden may have an uphill battle with the state’s younger voters and its significant Arab American population as he faces division over the war in the Middle East, the CPR report notes.
Biden has been publicly dismissive of his terrible poll numbers. Last week, right before someone crashed into his motorcade, a reporter asked Biden why he’s losing to Trump in the polls, and he replied, "You're reading the wrong polls."
Behind the scenes, however, he is reportedly “increasingly frustrated” by his “dismal poll numbers," according to a report from the Washington Post.
"After pardoning a pair of turkeys, an annual White House tradition, Biden delivered some stern words for the small group assembled: His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it,” the paper reported.
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Biden also complained that his economic messaging wasn't working.
David Faris, a political science professor at Roosevelt University, wrote in Slate that Democrats ought to be panicking right now and that the situation for Joe Biden is "even worse than it looks."
Precisely how scared Democrats should be about Biden’s standing depends on how his plight compares with those of presidents past. And there’s no sugarcoating it: This might be the worst polling environment for an incumbent president one year out from an election since the advent of the polling era in the 1930s and also the most dire situation facing any Democratic presidential candidate in decades. Panic is entirely warranted.
Various polls have shown Trump ahead in all or most of the aforementioned battleground states. If Trump were to sweep those states, he would comfortably win the Electoral College, 312 to Biden's 226. In fact, all he'd need to win is Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin to secure victory. Currently, that's very much possible, since he's got leads in all of those states. It may not even be close if the predicted depression does, in fact, happen next year.
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