Trumped Out

There's been a lot of consternation in the polling and rightly so.  It is hard to imagine Trump consistently polling ahead of Biden given the performances he has given on the campaign trail, let alone the pending trials which keep getting deferred as his legal eagles argue for "presidential immunity."  The Supreme Court voted to hear the case despite a unanimous 57-page opinion from a federal appeals court that made it explicitly clear he had no such immunity after leaving the Oval Office.  With so many red flags Trump should be lagging far behind in the polls, but as Sarah Jones and Jason Easley point out, the media (in this case the New York Times) is determined to make this election a "horse race."

It reminds me a lot of the past midterm elections when most news outlets and prognosticators were predicting a red wave.  538, which bills itself as an objective analysis of the polls, projected that the Republicans would not only take the House by an overwhelming margin but also gave them a 60% chance of taking the Senate in the closing weeks of the campaign.  538 offered a mea culpa of sorts but is making the same mistakes again in 2024, giving Trump the edge based on cherry-picking polls that show him leading.

The New York Times/Siena poll isn't the only poll in the business, but it is the most respected one that shows Trump leading.  For some odd reason, 538 ignores the Quinnipiac Poll, which has long had Biden leading. This is also a well-respected poll that offers starkly different demographic assessments from The New York Times.  How can that be?  

A lot of it comes down to the size of your polling sample and how you analyze the results.  As Jones/Easley noted, the NYT/Siena is making a lot of assumptions that simply don't hold up when you look at the Republican primary results.  To say that Trump has a 97% retention of support from 2020 when he is barely winning the majority of votes in these primaries is a glaring red flag, especially when exit polls indicate Nikki Haley supporters would not support Trump in the general election.  Granted, some of Haley's "supporters" are cross-over Democrats in open primaries, but most are disgruntled Republicans who can't bring themselves to vote for Trump.  Haley is the last remaining proxy for their dissatisfaction.

If we look at the Democratic side, Biden is retaining a much larger base of support.  What was supposed to be a protest vote in Michigan with Arab-American Democrats voting "uncommitted" in response to his support of Israel only garnered 13%.  This is a far cry from the 32% who voted against Trump in Michigan with Haley the only remaining opponent.  Granted, Democrats do have to worry about dissatisfaction in their ranks but it is nowhere near the level of frustration being expressed in the Republican primaries.  

In the one and only state where Republicans had multiple choices, Iowa, Trump garnered barely 50% of the vote.  This has led conservative outlets to opin that Trump doesn't have the mandate he thinks he has, often erroneously citing Biden's numbers as his own on the campaign trail.  Yet, Trump continues to reel in the endorsements on the false assumption he has a firm command of the conservative electorate. 

This firm command is not showing up on the campaign trail.  Trump has a rough and rowdy base that makes a lot of noise but they don't represent the Republican electorate as a whole.  Attempts to pitch an alternative candidate that would chip away at Trump's base while gaining what is now regarded as the RINO vote failed.  First it was DeSantis, then came Tim Scott and finally we had Nikki Haley.  They all firmly represented Republican values but didn't have the media savvy to compete against Trump.  Haley came the closest but then you have a party that is deathly afraid of women of color.  Look at how they have vilified Kamala Harris.  You think they would vote for Haley en masse?

Nikki did her best to project herself as one of the good old boys but her campaign is effectively over after suffering yet another defeat in Michigan.  She will trudge on but you know that she will throw her support behind Trump in the end.  Ironically, it was Nikki who fared the best in general election polls.  She was handily defeating Biden in almost all polls, but Republican voters stuck with Trump.

This brings us to another falacy that Biden and Trump are too old to run for president.  If that is the case, why did Democrats choose Biden over much younger candidates in 2020.  Instead, Democratic voters split among four septuagenarians.  Liz Warren may have look bright and vibrant but she was 70 when that set of primaries began.  Biden's closest competitor,  The "youthful" Bernie Saunders, is a year older than him.  The other silver candidate was Michael Bloomberg, who poured millions of his own money into the campaign only to come in a distant fourth.  It was clear that Democrats were not looking at age as a determining factor.  If so, they would have picked Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg.

Ditto the Republicans.  Donald was a spry 70 in 2016, batting away 24 other candidates despite being the oldest of the lot.  In 2020 he ran unopposed as a true incumbent.  Eight years later here he is with his hair spray painted orange again in an effort to capture the spirit of '16 when he defied all expectations to win the Republican nomination.  For whatever reason, the base of the party sticks with him despite suffering a string of humiliating defeats that began with the 2018 midterms when the Democrats took back the House and essentially rendered him a lame dick for the remainder of his single term.

The youth vote has been expressed in the House elections, not the Senate or Presidential elections.  It seems voters prefer seasoned candidates for these higher offices, although you get a few surprises like Jeff Ossoff  (37) who stole one of the Republican seats from Georgia thanks to Trump's deranged attitude when he barely lost the state in the general election.  Trump is now indicted on numerous racketeering counts for trying to overturn the results.

While this case and the federal cases are on hold pending the Supreme Court's determination of his "presidential immunity," this has to have a major impact on voters that the polls are not telling us.  It is much like how the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 shaped the midterm elections despite the polls' focus on Biden's sagging approval ratings.    

I suppose if there is any narrative in the media that would favor Biden it is that he is a latter-day Harry Truman, who found himself consistently trailing Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election only to pull off a massive "upset."  It's not that unusual.  Obama struggled to gain traction in 2012 with unemployment numbers still high only to score a similar victory over Romney in the general election.  It was this loss that emboldened the base of the Republican party to pick one of their own as the nominee in 2016 rather than another compromised candidate.  It came down to Trump vs. Ted Cruz and the old guard had no choice but to support Trump as they utterly loathed Cruz.  Well, here we go again, as St. Ronnie would say, only this time the old guard is "Trumped out."

Donald Trump has no path to victory barring an economic collapse on the scale of 2008, Golden sneakers aside.  Unfortunately for him, economic indicators are largely favorable for 2024, which means the closer we get to November the more likely voters are to stick with Biden.  Already we see Joe's approval ratings ticking upward, as was the case for Obama in 2012.  

This is why I remain optimistic despite what the New York Times or any other media contrived poll tells me.  They want to make this a horse race because it boosts their viewership and advertisement dollars, much like persons on social media will float conspiracy theories to generate hits and payouts.  The only poll that matters will be on November 5 and I firmly expect to see Biden declared the winner before the end of the evening, maybe even shortly after the last polling station closes in Alaska.