These polls may also be influenced by a lot of voters who are still hoping for a Biden alternative, and so aren’t willing to commit to supporting him him Biden against Trump in a meaningless poll, but who, further down the line, when it becomes clear that he is the only non-Trump option on the menu, will reluctantly fall in line.
Some may, but others will realize that letting a guy get elected who openly pushes anti-Muslim legislation and executive orders isn’t going to make things better.
I do sympathize. How do you properly show your dissatisfaction with the incumbent administration without helping bring in a worse administration?
This. So much this. It all reeks of priming the pump for the horse race coverage that they so desperately depend on.
All true, which is why I am not worried about Bidens meh showing, but I cant understand why trump still polls so well.
Which hands the election to trump, which is a horrible choice for them.
Exactly.
FWIW, I checked 5 of the prediction/betting sites that are making book on the 2024 Presidential race, and Biden was leading in all five. I think it was sort of close in one site, but in the others the Biden lead was substantial.
If you are saying that incumbents always underpoll the eventual challenger nominee in the year before the election, I question that.
In 2011, Obama was sometimes as much as 7 percent ahead of Romney in rolling poll averages, and, rarely, a bit behind:
Romney - Obama Rolling Polling Averages
If this was late 2011, I would conclude – swing voters haven’t made up their minds, so transient events, that won’t matter next year, are affecting the polls.
It’s true that Trump consistently underpolled Biden in 2019, but somehow that’s not giving me warm fuzzies.
The sample size of elections with the needed intensive polling is really small – just two. This should make me modest in drawing conclusions. I’m not saying Democrats should give up!
Biden may be thinking of the sample size of (if I am counting this correctly) ten elections where he was on the ballot. He is 10-10. Trump is 1-1.
There’s going to be an acid test in Mississippi tomorrow, with both the Democratic and Republican candidates opposed to abortion rights. The race is close, and may come down to whether progressive Democrats get out the vote for Brandon Phillips, who is generally a progressive (at lest in Mississippi terms) on issues other than abortion, or stay home, probably tipping the contest to the Republican Tate Reeves and his reprehensible record on pretty much every issue.
Proving, in my last post that I am not a sports fan.
Idea was that Biden always has won his races, unlike Trump.
So Biden’s track record is 10-0, or “ten for ten”, while trump’s is 1-1 or “1 for 2”.
He lost, at least, two primary races that I can think of. So, not undefeated.
I forgot that. He’s lost both party-run caucuses and government-run primaries.
I hope he remembers what it feels like and won’t want to risk it again.
Yea, I know, probably too late. If there was a chance of him quietly reconsidering, it wouldn’t happen while he’s spending a zillion hours a week working on getting American citizen hostages freed. (Not saying I have any clue what he could do there, but I’d wager he is trying hard.)
The problem with polls is that the pollsters have to interpret the results in some manner, even if the answers are not consistent among the the things asked. At this early point some voters don’t quite understand how politics run. They may think that Trump and Biden can be replaced by other candidates. In general, people do not understand elections. There is a vague understanding of the electoral college.
Democrats had a good day at the polls yesterday, winning both chambers in the Virginia legislature, the governor’s race in Kentucky, and two ballot measures in Ohio among others. What does this mean about Biden and his being behind? IMHO it means one of two things (or a combination of them).
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The polls are wrong.
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Biden is doing a bad job of campaigning.
IMHO what this means is the numbers are fixable, and the election winnable, if / when Biden gets his campaign going and does a good job of that.
Seems like the US is adopting the French model of polling 30% for the leader and then voting for him with 60/40 margins.
The polls were right. Polling accurately predicted Beshear’s reelection and that the Ohio abortion amendment would pass. The issue is that polling of the Presidential race a full year before the election is of limited predictive value.
If that’s the case, then there must be a reason for that. Maybe the old saying has been flipped on its head, and should now be “Republicans fall in love, Democrats fall in line” and Biden hasn’t yet started the task of getting Democrats to fall in line. In other words, he isn’t doing a good job of campaigning, most likely due to being distracted by the responsibilities of being POTUS.
ETA: It could also be that the nature of campaigning for POTUS has changed even within the last 3 years, and Trump is intuitively better at having figured out how to deal with the new realities than Biden is. Gone are the days where a candidate could buy a bunch of ads on TV, radio, and newspapers, and call it a day. Biden needs to adjust to that as well as Trump has.
There is an obvious reason Biden is doing relatively poorly in the polls - he is older than any other candidate has ever been. Voters (young ones in particular) don’t like that. So they are saying either they are undecided or that they will vote for Trump.
The CNN poll, for example, has young voters favoring Trump by 1%. In 2020 they went for Biden by 21%. So, either young people have abandoned the Democrats during the era in which Roe was overturned and the GOP is waging a massive culture war, or they are just expressing frustration with the fact that they are being asked to vote for Joe f’in Biden again.
The (relative) weakness with Black voters is prerhaps explainable (but almost certainly overstated in this poll), and I can almost buy the change in Hispanic voters.
But in general I think you have an outlier (just like CNN was a year out from Obama-Romney) along with general dissatisfaction that we are stuck with this matchup again. At this point in 2016 Obama was ahead in the average by about 1.5%. He won by 4%.
If you truly believe the Biden is a disastrous candidate, and you want Democrats to win (or just Trump to lose), then you better hope he decides not to run very VERY soon. Because any later is probably too late (it might already be). And a bloody primary that replaces Biden (or doesn’t) at the top of the ticket will almost certainly be worse (see: 1980).
If I understand you correctly, and replace with less dramatic numbers but in the same direction: Yes!
Our American candidates are and will be unpopular. Approval levels for the nomination front runners, Biden and Trump, are low. If Trump becomes a convicted felon, his approval level will go even lower. Same for Biden when there is bad news. Doesn’t mean it will affect who votes for whom.
Democrats have been doing well lately in lower turnout by-elections and off-year elections, as yesterday. The message for Democrats, who believes that elections are determined by turnout, may be – Hope for low turnout next year! How to achieve this when the GOP nominates a wacky ticket riling up both sides, I have no idea.
I think they might be using the polls as an opportunity to send a message to Biden, but if it doesn’t work, they’ll vote for him over Trump enthusiastically.
That’s my working theory as well, but it’s always possible that my biases are clouding my perception of things. Certainly the relatively few “young adults” (<35) I speak to are pretty unanimous in holding the opinion of “I really wish Biden weren’t running again” and “I will never vote for Trump”. And the Roe ruling has gotten them all pretty fired up politically. Whether that will carry over to 2024 is an open question.
If I had to pick the mean outcome it would probably be a narrower Biden popular vote win (say, 2-3%) with it coming down to the same set of swing states as last time around. Unless Trump gets convicted of something significant or Biden has a serious health issue. Or a regional war breaks out in the ME. Or…