Where Does the Race Stand Now?

The electorate is itching to dump Biden but the Republicans seem to want to make it complicated. They might win anyway, even with Trump.

I’m a Goldwater/Reagan/Bush Republican. People like me used to be the majority of the Party. Whether we are any more is very much open to doubt. Donald Trump has brought in a brand of populism and “screw-the-elites” rebellion that now seems to be dominant. Unfortunately, because of his self-absorption and significant character flaws — and very likely his provably criminal behavior — the emerging texture of the Party, although certainly not without a fresh and strong appeal, comes with an aroma many of the older breed find unappetizing or worse.

For this reason and others, we have looked to other candidates as preferable to square off with Joe Biden. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are the two remaining now. In my view, either would make a fine President, certainly by recent standards. Both seem like traditional small government, law-and-order, fiscal sanity, control-the-border, pride-in-America conservatives. But one of the main arguments for nominating one of them instead of The Donald is strictly pragmatic: They don’t have anything like Trump’s gargantuan baggage and therefore offer a better chance of winning in November. Indeed, so the argument has often gone, Trump is the only serious potential candidate decrepit Joe has a realistic chance of beating.

Recent developments present good news and bad news. The good news is that Biden is indeed in trouble. The bad news is that precisely this trouble undermines the pragmatic argument for someone other than Trump. Particularly noteworthy was this story from none other than CNN about how a Trump v. Biden race would come out today:

Oooooooops. Even without any of what CNN regards as the true toss-up states, Trump wins the White House (although just barely).

Now this is just one outlet’s view of things, the outcome is very close, and the election is ten months away. But another couple of stories, each from different sources, carry the much the same message.

First, from the Richmond Times dispatch:

President Joe Biden leads former President Donald Trump 49% to 43% in Virginia in a potential 2024 rematch with 8% undecided, according to a new survey from Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy.

Looks like Biden is safely ahead, no? But the kicker is in the very next line:

In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Virginia by 10 percentage points, 54.1% to 44%.

And this:

While Virginians do not register by party, Trump led among self-described independents — 46% to 41%, with 13% undecided.

Biden’s job approval rating in the survey was mixed, with 49% approval and 49% disapproval and 2% not sure. His numbers have improved since January 2023, when 45% approved of how he was performing the job, 52% disapproved and 3% were not sure.

So here’s the takeaway. In a blueish state that Democrats have carried in four straight Presidential elections, and where Biden is more popular than he is nationally, but that in other ways is decently representative of the country, Trump is doing four points better than he did in 2020; and despite a tidal wave of continuous awful publicity, he wins independents by five points.

Four years ago, Biden won the national popular vote by slightly over four points. If that advantage has indeed been erased, Trump is very likely to win the White House this time. Recall that in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by two points (48.2% for Hillary to 46.1% for Trump) but sailed through the Electoral College.

The other story that strikes me as a straw in the wind and makes me think the CNN assessment is accurate is this one, which asks if New York, of all states, is in play this year:

The last Republican presidential candidate to carry the state was Ronald Reagan, who won there in both the 1980 and 1984 elections. Since then, the best performances by a Republican presidential nominee were George W. Bush’s 40 percent in 2004 and Trump’s 37.8 percent in 2020.

New York also hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 2002 and hasn’t sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1992.

But there are nonetheless some emerging signs that 2024 could see a political earthquake in New York.

Perhaps most alarmingly for the Biden campaign, the president’s lead in a potential rematch with Trump this year has shrunk to just 10 points in the latest Siena poll fielded last November. After Biden won the state by more than 23 points in 2020, his advantage has now been more than cut in half – and that’s without any concerted effort by Trump to flip the state.

In that same poll, just 45 percent of New Yorkers said they approve of the job Biden is doing as president, compared to 53 percent who disapprove. 55 percent of Democrats polled said they wanted someone other than Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president.

I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance that Trump will carry New York, but again the operative news is that, as in Virginia — a very different state — Biden’s lead over Trump is so much less than it was four years ago.

As Paul has persuasively argued, a second Trump term is likely to be less successful and more indigestible, to put it gently, than his first. But the news from various, independent sources strongly suggests that, DeSantis and Haley to the contrary, Trump can win. Indeed, it looks at this point that he probably will.

P.S. On the merits, either DeSantis or Haley is, in my view, still easily the better choice.

BONUS COVERAGE: One very curious story this last week was about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. It seems that Sec. Austin simply disappeared for three or four days without, so we are told, telling President Biden. This is in the middle of Russia’s war with Ukraine; active US military assistance to Israel in its war for survival with Iran’s stooge, Hamas; and the decision by — well, who knows, really? — to finally launch retaliation against Iran’s other stooge, the Houthis, for weeks of aggression against international shipping.

Austin is a West Point graduate and career soldier for more than 40 years with an extremely impressive resume’. Apparently, he has prostate cancer and then developed complications that put him in the hospital. But for a life-long soldier not to notify his commanding officer — the President — about his condition? And to make this blunder in a time of an active and unstable military involvement in several parts of the world?

Does that sound right to you? It certainly doesn’t to me. I never held a rank anything like a cabinet secretary, or held that kind of responsibility, but when I was a lawyer in White House Counsel’s Office (for George H. W. Bush) I didn’t so much as go home for Christmas without telling my superiors where I was and how to get ahold of me every hour of the day.

Q: What’s the real likelihood that Sec. Austin actually just vamoosed without a word? A: Essentially zero. Q: So what actually happened? A: He told Biden and Biden forgot.

No I can’t prove it. I can’t come close to proving it. But I have some experience both with how older people cope, or fail to; and with how the higher reaches of the federal government work, and I’ll bet good money that what we’re hearing now is nothing more than a cover story for something that, if it got out, should and would be the end of Biden’s campaign.