There is no situation where this logic couldn’t be used against young new blood. Obama was young new blood against Hillary.
The DNC might as well set up a permanent party regulation: “Nobody under the age of 60, or who lacks 20 years of experience in politics, shall be permitted to run for president.”
Let’s squelch those youngsters and put them permanently in their place.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn’t help your point. 
Heck, it’s not even that. It’s just a strawman. “We need an experienced dealmaker in this extremely fractured political climate” isn’t close to saying we should only have elderly presidents.
And even a person who does think the president should always be an elder statesman isn’t trying to “put [those youngsters] permanently in their place.” It’s not a bonkers idea unless you’ve fallen for the “drain the swamp” nonsense that rich elites have invented to differentiate themselves from other rich elites.
I just got an email popup ad about this: Fundraiser in the works with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden
…and if Hillary had been the nominee that year, and she won the election, maybe we would have ended up with Slightly More Experienced Obama vs. Trump in 2016. Imagine that match-up.
Mitt Romney says he’d never vote for Biden. There’s one vote off the table! He also doesn’t like Trump, but he thinks he’ll win. Well, yes, if you don’t vote for Biden he will, knucklehead.
Your link says “Romney did not specify whether he’d back the Democratic nominee in December, but in the past, he has not ruled out voting for Joe Biden.”
I think what it’ll come down to is how many people like Romney will end up voting for Biden vs. how many on the far left who in 2020 were voting against an incumbent Trump rather than for Biden stay home. Those are both very small slices of the electorate, so IMHO it’s gong to be a difficult race to predict.
Dang it, you’re quite right. I switched them in my head with what I expected. Mea culpa. Apologies to all.
In 2020, during the primary season, he said he would never vote for Trump and under no circumstances would he vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
He indicated that he would probably end up casting a write-in vote for his wife, like he allegedly did in 2016, but he never specifically said he wouldn’t vote for Biden.
https://www.axios.com/2020/02/05/mitt-romney-trump-impeachment-2020-election-vote
Eric is definitely not an alpha male. Trump is.
New NY Times Siena poll (gift link) shows Biden continues to be deeply unpopular with voters and many who voted Biden in 2020 plan to vote DJT or sit out the election.
We keep saying it is too early to worry about this or that the polling is garbage but I wonder at what point do numbers like this start to mean the Ds and Biden are in real trouble. I cannot see HOW people are really looking at both of these men and think DJT is the better choice. Trump certainly comes across as more energetic so I guess that translates to strength but how is that all that matters to these people?
I keep thinking the upcoming State of the Union speech could provide the President with an opportunity to turn this around but I’m beginning to get a bit nervous these numbers are baked in at this point. And with the Trump trials getting pushed back more and more it appears there is less likelihood every day they will hurt him.
The Biden camp needs to come up with a way to motivate voters under 45 and nonwhite voters who didn’t graduate from college pretty damn quickly or this will be a disaster.
That poll shows that 97% of 2020 Trump voters are sticking with him – this doesn’t at all comport with the primary results so far, in which 30-50% of Republican primary voters are rejecting Trump (and many/most of those say they won’t vote for him in the general).
General election polling this early still doesn’t mean anything, statistically speaking – no correlation with the eventual result – but considering the primary results, I stand by my earlier hypothesis that there’s something profoundly wrong with polling right now:
It’s just a hypothesis, but we’ll see. I’m not particularly worried by these way-too-early polls.
I guess I’m wondering when do we get to the point where these polls aren’t way too early?
We’ve been saying polls are too early for a while now - a year out? Too early. Nine months? Still too early. Now we are at eight months and nothing appears to be changing for Biden. Whether it’s campaign messaging or public perception there is a point where turning this around will become impossible.
I’m not in panic mode but there has to be a point where it becomes a serious problem if things don’t change. When is that?
I do think this is a much bigger concern today than in the past. Decades ago, guys like Bush Sr. were able to turn a big deficit into a big win over the course of half a year. Gore went from trailing Bush Jr. by 11% at one point to leading him by 10%. (Of course, he later still lost, but that proves the point - things were volatile back then.) That’s because the electorate was really pretty centrist and persuade-able.
Today, things are much more baked-in than before. People are bitterly entrenched. So if polls are already looking not-so-rosy for Biden, it’s not likely to improve drastically as time goes on. Of course, Biden only needs small improvements in the polls since he’s still in the driver’s seat. A better economy, a stronger Ukraine, a migrant-border-deal, could all do it. But, unlike the 1980s or 1990s, there isn’t a big chunk of 30% independent/centrist voters who could drastically flip one way or another.
Biden would do well to take advice from Bill Clinton, who famously said that no matter what the polls say, you had better always campaign as if you’re ten percentage points behind.
Citing some polling data: According to FiveThirtyEight, in March 2, 2020 (four years ago,) Biden was leading Trump by 4.1% in the polls. Eight months later, Biden ended up defeating Trump in the November election by 4.5%.
So, yes, even polling as far out early as March can be remarkably close to what the final November results will be. I’m not saying this year will necessarily repeat what happened four years ago, but the Biden campaign can’t afford to just handwave current polls away as “Aw shucks, it’s only March, things will surely improve for us by autumn.”
I’m my understanding, historically, general election polls have predictive power starting around the summer, when the nominees are officially set and the public really begins paying attention.
I question that.
The sample size of cycles, that were frequently polled by many pollsters, is too small to establish such a date.
And when polling becomes predictive is dependent not just on how close we are to the election, but also on how fluid the race is. If the numbers are significantly changing, there isn’t going to be a magic point in time when polling is predictive, other than the last polls before Election Day. If the polling numbers have changed little over many months, they likely are meaningful regardless of how far in advance the long polling plateau occurs.
In this cycle, I see several unusual factors affecting when to take polls seriously.
One is that polling averages have not moved much over the past year.
Another is that pollsters repeatedly have found virtually all voters have either made up their minds, or are already leaning towards, either Biden or Trump, as seen here.
This tells me that early polling means more this cycle,
Going the other way is great uncertainty over Trump’s legal situation, with many Trump voters apparently planning to change if DJT becomes a convicted felon.
@iiandyiiii nailed it. Most of the public isn’t paying attention. Yes, even now.
Agree completely about this snip. Disagree about your conclusion from it.
Why do I say that? Because the world is now so different as you say, I conclude we need a new way to categorize the electorate. A way that the real polls do not yet capture with any decent fidelity. And may never be able to.
IMO the citizens can be put into 5 mutually exclusive groups:
Group 1 and 2 are baked in as you say. Some of group 5 can be persuaded to vote one way or the other by a well-timed crisis or manufactured “crisis”. Most can’t be persuaded to vote at all.
All the action in this election will be in groups 3 & 4. Whichever group has bigger turnout in the small number of competitive states will decide the election. With a smidgen of group 5 action adding salt and pepper to the Group 3/4 stew.
All the “Who would you vote for today?” polls don’t distinguish between groups 1 & 3, nor 2 & 4. Yes, there is a lot of noise about polling “likely voters”, not just citizens at large. But that’s mostly smoke & guesswork.
At least one part isn’t smoke — asking the polled register voter whether they plan to vote.
Re your groups, there is the group who will vote for Trump unless a convicted criminal.
And there is another group who will vote for Trump unless in prison.
This isn’t exhaustive. There is a group who will vote for Biden if he comes down hard enough on Natayahu, and another group that will switch to Trump if Biden does that.