Ron Brownstein sums up the Democratic Party's dilemma: "The movement to force President Joe Biden to step aside has widespread support in the party, but probably not enough support to overcome his adamant refusal to do so."
Indeed, Joe Biden won't go until he's utterly convinced that his position in the polls is irretrievable or the vast majority of the Democratic Party deserts him. Neither circumstance has been achieved — yet.
Yesterday, another nail was pounded in the coffin with the release of a CBS News poll showing Donald Trump increasing his lead over the president.
Since a poll on July 3 by CBS, Biden has lost a point from 48 to 47% while Trump has gained two points from 50-52%.Trump also tops Vice President Kamala Harris 51-48%.
As CBS states, "To put that national lead in context: it's been 20 years since a Republican presidential candidate has won the national popular vote, and over 30 years since a Republican won by more than five."
The poll also found that 26% of voters were more likely to vote for Trump after the assassination attempt, which doesn't seem like much, but when anything seen as positive is added to the mix in a close election, it's huge.
Another positive in the CBS poll was the response to Trump's choice of Senator JD Vance as the vice presidential nominee. Ninety-four percent of respondents were either "enthusiastic" (51%) or "satisfied" (43%) by Trump's choice.
The calculus of the Biden camp is not so much the current state of polls but trying to decipher whether or not Biden could come back from where he is now without a major Trump screw-up. Given that, the picture continues to darken for the Democrats.
But most Democratic political professionals—the party’s campaign managers, strategists, media consultants, and pollsters—are in a funereal mood about Biden’s chances to overtake Trump. Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster who is critical of Trump, says out loud what most of these Democratic professionals will still say to reporters only under terms of anonymity. “If the Democrats persist in nominating Joe Biden,” Ayres told me this week, “they are essentially ceding the presidency to Donald Trump.”
By any measure, Trump is in a stronger position today than when he accepted his previous two presidential nominations. On the day Trump was first nominated, in July 2016, the national polling average maintained by the political website FiveThirtyEight showed him trailing the Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by 2.5 percentage points. When President Trump accepted the GOP nomination again, in August 2020, that same average showed him trailing Biden by 8.4 percentage points.
It's not that Biden doesn't know this. Certainly, by now, the sycophants and yes-men he has surrounding him who may have previously been telling him he could still win are trying to break through the miasma and show him just how desperate his position is.
That will take time — a commodity the Democrats simply don't have.
Today, FiveThirtyEight shows Trump leading Biden by 2 percentage points. Yet that understates the extent of Trump’s advantage, as operatives in both parties agree. The main reason is Trump’s polling lead is greater than that margin in almost all of the swing states that will determine the election. The other reason is most of the other important measures in the polls are worse for Biden than his performance in the simple horse race against Trump. That indicates the difficulty Biden may face trying to expand his support enough to erase Trump’s lead.
It's not just the swing states. Biden is in trouble in states he shouldn't even have to try in. Minnesota has Trump and Biden tied. New Mexico shows Trump ahead. Maine, another usually reliable blue state, has Trump dead even with Biden.
Biden's approval rating of 40% is on par with other presidents who lost re-election bids: Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 all had approval ratings underwater in the 40s on election day. Longtime GOP pollster Bill McInturff told Brownstein that “every conventional polling standard tells us Joe Biden is going to lose.”
Now, if only someone could break the news to the president.
