There’s a new poll by New York Times/Sienna of six states that probably hold the key to the 2024 election. The poll tests the strength of the two likely major party nominees — Joe Biden and Donald Trump — in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (As far as I can tell, the poll did not include Robert Kennedy Jr. or any other independent candidate.)
Trump leads Biden in all of these states except Wisconsin.
Trump leads by 4 points in Pennsylvania; by 5 in Arizona; by 6 in Georgia; by 10 in Nevada (which the Republicans haven’t carried since 2004); and by 5 in Michigan. Biden leads by 2 in Wisconsin.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times offers this reading of the polls, which seems on the mark:
The striking results seem to be more a reflection of Biden’s weakness than Trump’s strength. Trump is just as unpopular as he was when he lost the election three years ago, if not slightly more so.
Instead, the change is the public’s view of Biden. During his time in office, attitudes toward him have turned decidedly negative. In the last election, voters judged him to be more likable than Trump, to have a better temperament and to have a more appealing personality. Those advantages have largely disappeared.
Instead, voters say they are concerned about Biden’s handling of the economy and about his age. More than 70 percent of registered voters in the battlegrounds agree with the statement that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president,” up from around 30 percent in the run-up to the last election.
Looking at key Democratic constituencies, Cohn finds:
Biden appears to be especially weak among young, Black and Hispanic voters. In a major departure from recent electoral trends, he and Trump are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-old voters, even though young voters have tended to back Democrats by a wide margin in recent cycles.
Among Black voters, more than 90 percent of whom usually back Democrats, Biden leads only 71-22. He holds only 50 percent of Hispanic voters across the battlegrounds, down from more than 60 percent in the last cycle.
This fact is also daunting for Biden:
Nearly half of registered voters (49 percent) in the battleground states say there’s “almost no chance” they’ll support [Biden], an indication of the depth of their dissatisfaction.
Cohn adds, correctly I think, that voters who say “almost never” about a candidate a year before an election aren’t necessarily lost to that candidate. Nonetheless, these poll results are bad news for Biden.
They are also bad news for Trump’s GOP challengers. The poll seems like the last nail (or maybe a surplus one) in the coffin of the non-Trump Republican candidates.
On the other hand, the poll results are good news for most of those who believe (as I do) that Trump’s presidency was far superior to Biden’s. There’s a caveat, though. A second Trump term would likely be considerably worse than his first term was.
On what evidence would Trump be worse in his second term?
Paul: I don't think the nature of a second Trump term is predictable. He'll be as good as the operatives and the managers he can put around him, and the challenges he's dealt.
On the talent side, he cannot do any worse than he did in 2016-17, and given what he's been through and team he has assembled to defend him, he has more talent around him now than he did then. The first term showed that he was able to improve his team, even in t he face of brutal and extra-legal subversion all around his Presidency.
Unlike Biden, he is not stupid. He may not be erudite, but he has pretty good instincts and when he follows them instead of his vindictive impulses, he steers in the right direction.
The activist base has also stepped up since 2020 and become more professional.
Part of the talent equation is also the Congress, and this may be the biggest wild card. Mike Johnson and new leadership in the Senate would contribute immensely to a successful Trump second term.
As for the challenges ahead, he's inheriting an economy that has been literally torn apart by Biden and the Obamunists behind him, and international conflagrations that threatens to spread into regional or international conflict.
On the economy, he will first deal with energy policy, which I believe is the mother of prosperity. Eliminating self-imposed energy scarcity will have an immediate impact on markets, trade, and consumer prices. It will not in and of itself end inflation, but it will move one of the inflationary pressures that was completely self-imposed by Biden and his Net Zero lunatics.
Trump will bray about interest rates, Powell hill hold the line, and that is good. We may wind up in a couple of years with inflation down to 3% and interest rates at an historically normal 5%.
That will not hold, however, if Congress doesn't cut spending, and that may be the biggest domestic challenge. During the Reagan recovery of 82, he wound up being able only to cut the rate of growth and the market responded. Today, we are far deeper in debt and the deficit as a percent of total budget is much higher. So he'll have to do more than cut the rate of growth, which will mean a vicious PR war as the media strikes up its violin section.
Internationally, Trump cannot do worse than Biden/Harris/Blinken. Given his history with Arab and Israeli leadership in the region, and the Abraham Accords as a base to build on, it's likely he'll take an unambiguous position to abandon the two-state solution nonsense that the foreign policy community has insisted on and resume triangulation of Israel and Arab interests against Iranian power. That's the ticket, but it's going to be much harder to do after Israel pounds Gaza and southern Lebanon into dirt.
It may also just be the case that given the catastrophe of the last three years, any President will have an awful four years ahead of him.