Biden can - and must - still win

Don't let the polls get you down

If you’re consuming even just a little bit of political commentary right now, you’ve probably noticed that the polls occupy a strange position in the discourse at this point of an election cycle. On the one hand, pundits will tell you that they don’t really mean much until closer to November. But then on the other, those same pundits will spend vast amounts of time obsessing over and analyzing them. This is partly because it’s what editors want, partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly because people are looking for any concrete scraps of data they can about an event that’s going to happen five months from now.

The main thrust of this commentary right now is that Biden is in trouble, trailing Trump in the polls. He’s having difficulty consolidating his own base of younger voters, non-whites, and liberals. That could spell doom in November, the argument goes. And this argument could well be right. But there are also important caveats that don’t get mentioned so often.

Here’s three:

Firstly, not all polls are created equal. The polls you really have to care about are not national polls or even every swing state poll, but the polls in the states that a candidate actually needs to win. The media often reports that Biden is trailing badly in swing state polls, but he can actually afford to lose many of these states and still retain the presidency. According to current polls, it wouldn’t be surprising if Biden lost Arizona, Georgia and Nevada - but it also wouldn’t matter so long as he triumphed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. And in those states he’s trailing Trump only by 1 - 2%, or less than an average-sized polling error. Far from being Trump’s to lose, the race in the Midwest is on a knife-edge and could go either way.

Secondly, many of Biden’s problems are with base voters who usually end up coming home. People’s natural tendency to get dissatisfied with incumbents and their lack of focus on the contrast between the two candidates is currently working against Biden. Gaza is also undoubtedly harming him. But the pressure-cooker nature of the final weeks of a campaign tends to force partisans back into their corner. In politics, people often make the mistake of asking “how popular is this thing?” when what they should be asking is “how popular will this thing be after a billion dollars of advertising is spent defining it?” Campaigns have consequences, and there’s plenty of room for voters to be reminded of how much they dislike Donald Trump.

Thirdly, many voters are currently paying little to no attention to politics, meaning that their preferences may shift once they tune in. This will help with base consolidation, but it will also be an opportunity for the Biden campaign to remind swing voters what they disliked about the Trump years. Those voters who are most tuned out are probably the ones most susceptible to the message that repeating the highly-polarized, chaotic and divisive experience of the Trump years would not be good for either them or the country.

Finally - and more tentatively - Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts does seem to have moved the polls, at least for now. It’s still early, but post-conviction polls have shown a small swing towards Biden of about 1% - a shift that sounds small, but which is highly significant in such a tight race. Interestingly, this shift has come from Biden gaining support by consolidating wavering voters, rather than by taking votes from Trump directly. That’s consistent with the idea that Trump has a loyal but difficult-to-grow base whereas Biden still has room for a lot of consolidation ahead of him as traditional Democratic voters and 2020 swing voters come home.

One thing I’ll never do in this newsletter is tell you that things are rosy when they’re not. But don’t fall into pessimism or alarmism, either. There’s a long way to go in this election, and it’s still all up for grabs.

And that’s important because this is one that the Democrats really need to win - not just for narrow partisan reasons, but in order to save the country from the radical right.