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April 15, 2024

Disagreeable news: Biden is gaining on Trump

By Monica Showalter

Something unpleasant is going on.

After months of holding a commanding lead that kept rising, President Trump has started to stall and Joe Biden is now catching up to him in the polls.

A good indicator is here:

 

 

The New York Times reports this:

President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy and his age, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now virtually tied, with Mr. Trump holding a 46 percent to 45 percent edge. That is an improvement for Mr. Biden from late February, when Mr. Trump had a sturdier 48 percent to 43 percent lead just before he became the presumptive Republican nominee.

Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago. Then, Mr. Trump had secured the support of far more of his past voters compared with the president — 97 percent to 83 percent — but that margin has narrowed. Mr. Biden is now winning 89 percent of his 2020 supporters compared with 94 percent for Mr. Trump.

And a pretty good mostly neutral analysis by a guy who is usually a flaming partisan for Democrats, Ed Kilgore, was laid out in New York magazine:

Joe Biden is continuing his snail-like progress toward a dead heat with Donald Trump in polling this week. The RealClearPolitics polling averages for a national head-to-head contest between the two presidents now show Trump up by a mere 0.2 percent (45.5 to 45.3 percent), his smallest lead in these averages dating back to last October. If you took a very outlierish Rasmussen Poll giving Trump an eight-point lead out of the equation, Biden would actually be ahead. As it is, he leads Trump in the most recent surveys by Reuters-Ipsos, I&I-TIPP, Data for Progress, NPR-PBS-Marist, and Quinnipiac, a pretty impressive collection of pollsters (all but I&I-TIPP are in the top-25 outfits, according to FiveThirtyEight’s ratings). In the most influential poll, from New York Times/Siena, Trump’s lead dropped from five points in late February to one point in mid-April.

Trump is maintaining a slightly larger lead (1.9 percent) in the national five-way polls that include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein, per RCP’s averages. RFK Jr. holds 10 percent of the 13.2 percent going to non-major-party candidates. So the larger field continues to help Trump and hurt Biden, albeit marginally.

Obviously, one can say the polls are all wrong and Trump will kick it come November. But if the polls could be right when Trump was leading, it's silly to ignore the results of them now, particularly in aggregate. Actually, it's the worst thing we could do.

Something smelly is happening given the mess Joe Biden has made and the prospects of four more years of it is a complete horror, quite possibly the death of the republic. No one has hazarded a guess as to why these polls have switched toward Biden, as bad as that prospect is. So, I will.

Could it be that inflation being technically halted is improving Biden's outlook? He hasn't stopped any government spending, but the Fed has stopped printing as much money, so maybe that has people feeling slightly better about the economy. Some polls show consumer sentiment starting to turn upward.

Could it be that Joe Biden's under-the-table deal with Mexico's president to halt the illegal flow until after the election is working its magic?

Or could it be the serial student loan forgivenesses from Biden, all of them illegal and subject to court challenge, that's turning voters towards him? It's interesting that he's dishing out his 'forgiveness' in dribs and drabs instead of all at once, as if to keep the polling bumps going upward.

Or could it be that abortion, the Democrats' signature issue, with all its bizarre fearmongering about coat hangers and miscarriages and being 'punished' with a baby is the driver. Commentator Peachy Keenan had an interesting tweet here:

 

 

...and I hope it's not as true as she suggests it is, with such a large portion of the population, but at least some of it is.

Or could it be recent failures in Congress, over warrantless surveillance and gargantuan budget passages that is driving them to Biden?

Or could the trials against Trump simply be wearing voters down?

I don't know. I just know it's grim news, given that four more years of corrupt Joe Biden means four more years of national decline, possibly irreversible, as the courts get stacked, the illegals become Democrat voters, elections get more rigged than ever, and wokester DEI culture emerges triumphant.

That said, this polling switch shouldn't be a cause for despair -- bit by bit, Republicans have been notching gains in past elections, and that trend should be their friend.

Polling numbers like this should be a call to action, for Republicans to hit Democrats harder than ever on the campaign trail -- on Biden's spending, his open borders, his sentience, his green mandates, his crony corruption, his wars, his targeting of Medicare Advantage, his bedding down with the teachers' unions, his impact on 401(k)s, his gas prices, to name some important issues to these voters who are drifting away. No scolding of them like Hillary does, just persuade, persuade, persuade, and try to dominate the debate.

Republicans must seize the narrative once again, laying out the impact of all of Biden's failures on ordinary people and reminding the public that they aren't better off now than they were four years ago -- and won't be better off with four more long years of Biden four years from now. One can only hope that the Trump team is on its feet because a close election will be a Democrat-rigged election. It shouldn't be close.

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