Will Trump Beat Biden in the General Election?

Probably not. Trump's base is not enough to elect him. Where does the rest come from?

The Big Enchilada is whether Trump or Biden will win the general election a little less than 15 months from now. I know, I know, there’s a chance it won’t be either one. Biden is 80 and looking bad. Trump is 77 and considerably overweight. At their ages, “Tomorrow is not promised” is not just an aphorism. Justice Scalia was 79 and to all appearances healthy when he went to bed one night and didn’t get up the next day.

And age is not the only wildcard here. Trump is going to spend the next several months (at least) fighting off four indictments in four different venues. Some of the charges he’ll be required to answer border on frivolous (the Alvin Bragg indictment) but some are more serious and have been launched by a more serious prosecutor (Jack Smith). His getting nominated seems very likely with his big and seemingly stable (or even slightly growing) lead, yes. But criminal litigation is a minefield, and I have seldom seen anyone look good as a criminal defendant, so in my view Trump’s nomination is not guaranteed. The platform, “I am not a criminal” is just not a great look.

Similarly, if Biden becomes more directly and visibly linked to Hunter’s years-long money grubbing schemes — schemes that enriched the Biden family by millions from foreign sources while Joe was Vice President — his aura of harmless Uncle Joe is going to take a beating. Normally, the MSM would cover for him, but this time there are two related possibilities that could make the cover permeable: First, Joe’s “I-know-nothing-about-nothing” story falls apart too obviously to make the usual press muzzing-over possible; and second, the press/Democratic establishment become convinced that Joe has become so tarnished, in addition to so dilapidated, that he’ll probably lose, even to Trump, so someone different is needed.

And there’s this too, which I understand is unkind to put so bluntly, but it’s out there: Joe may be two stumble-and-fall episodes away from being unelectable under any circumstances. After 80, aging doesn’t take captives. The descent can be fast and ugly.

Still, as things stand now, the nominees are likely to be Trump and Biden. Current polling has them neck-and-neck. A NYT poll two weeks ago had them tied at 43% each. Today’s Real Clear Politics survey shows that, averaging the six most recent poll results, Trump has a lead of less than one percent. with both candidates around 43%. If you go back to include two earlier polls, Biden has a similarly minuscule lead.

So, putting the wildcard possibilities to one side, who has the advantage?

I think Biden does, for several reasons, the first of which is that Trump is not going to win with 43%, and it’s just very hard to see where the additional, needed votes are coming from.

I mean, really, where are they coming from? Is there anyone out there not living in a cave who doesn’t already have a pretty firm opinion about Donald Trump?

I doubt it, although the NYT, with certain qualifications, says there are. But the news about them isn’t good from Trump’s point of view:

….43 plus 43 obviously does not equal 100. There are also 14 percent of registered voters who declined to choose either candidate. Some of them said that they would not vote next year. Others said they would support a third-party candidate. Still others declined to answer the poll question.

You can think of this 14 percent as the Neither of the Above (NOTA) voters, at least for now. In the end, a significant number of them probably will vote for Biden or Trump and go a long way toward determining who occupies the White House in 2025….

Perhaps the most notable characteristic of NOTA voters is that they are highly critical of Trump. By definition, they are also unenthusiastic about Biden. But they are considerably less happy with Trump:

NOTA voters are more likely than all registered voters to say they believe Trump “has committed serious federal crimes” and more likely to say his behavior after the 2020 election “threatened American democracy.” On both questions, a majority of all registered voters give these anti-Trump answers, but an even larger majority of NOTA voters do:

These patterns are a reminder that most voters have never supported Trump. He won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and he generally became less popular during his presidency. His unpopularity helped Democrats retake control of the House in 2018, oust him from the presidency in 2020 and fare much better than expected in the 2022 midterms.

This is an important point if not, for Republican partisans, a particularly welcome one. Trump won in 2016 essentially by drawing an inside straight. Yes, it could happen again, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it. And since then, in terms of electoral clout, it’s been pretty much downhill. The out-party’s (i.e., the Democrats’) re-taking the House in 2018 is no big surprise (being consistent with historical patterns), but Trump’s 2020 loss wasn’t that close, and, as Paul has shown elsewhere on Ringside, there is good reason to think that Trump cost Republicans several Senate seats in 2020 and one or two more last year. In the most recent general elections, Trump has been a net minus.

That’s a message for next year.

Trump and his closest allies in the Republican Party have alienated swing voters, especially in the suburbs. Trump has also helped inspire a continuing surge of turnout among Democratic-leaning young voters in swing states.

There’s a message in that, too.

The suburbs should be a fertile field for the Republican candidate. Suburban voters tend to be more white and more prosperous than city dwellers. They are more tax payers than tax eaters. They tend to have children, and are thus sensitive to candidates’ stands on drugs, crime, and dumbed-down educational standards. But Trump’s carelessness about law and norms, his crudeness, his self-absorption, and his whole persona is toxic to them, and the gains Republicans should make in the suburbs simply are not going to happen if he’s the candidate. That’s just how it is.

A very smart friend of mine, a big star defense lawyer, put it to me this way:

I’m going to borrow from Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade, in the climactic scene of "The Maltese Falcon," summing up to Brigid O'Shaughnessy just where she stands: "All those are on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. What have we got on the other side?" Not enough, as it turned out, to overcome the number of reasons to doubt her. Same here. With Trump, there's too much baggage, too much drama, too much enervation -- too much to overcome whatever positive attributes he might muster.

We can win next year, we should win, and for the country’s sake we need to win. But if Trump is the candidate, we’re probably going to lose.