Biden Pulls Ahead; Trump’s Odds Continue To Decline

Amid the gales of media speculation, the hard-fact polls are calling on a Biden victory in 2024.

The rigorous journalism site FiveThirtyEight puts Biden as the winner over Trump 52 times out of 100.   It also says Trump’s chances of winning the November 2024 presidential election are declining, according to a new aggregation of polls. 

Next week I will review a book on why the decline is happening, based on the slippage in White Rule, but suffice to say now that Trump’s odds of success peaked in 2016 and have been dropping ever since.

The 538 polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign "fundamentals," such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.

Of special interest is that Trump's margins over Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.

The latest poll represents the worst result for Trump since May 20.

The Neilson audience polls have another but different indicator:  they show that the number of viewers who tuned in to watch the first two nights of the Republican National Convention plummeted this year compared to 2016.  (In 2020, the Covid epidemic affected the conventions.)  

But this year an estimated 18.13 million viewers tuned in to watch a bandaged Trump appear, and an estimated 14.81 million viewers tuned in on the second day.  

In 2016, 23 million people tuned in to watch the first night of the convention and 19.75 million people tuned in for the second night.

It was a drop of 25% in viewership – and this at a time when Trump was riding the excitement of the assassination attempt and the potential audience had expended: the U.S. population grew by 20 million people between those elections.

The assassination attempt has not boosted his ranking:  polls published after the assassination attempt have suggested his support base is not getting any larger.

Perhaps people are reflecting on the meaning of his policies…

Non-college White voters remain a larger share of the electorate in many of the key states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential race (particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).  But even across those states, these voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate.

Non-college Whites have fallen from around two-thirds of the total vote under Ronald Reagan, to about three-fifths under Bill Clinton, to less than half under Barack Obama, to the current level of just under two-fifths.

The data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end.  Though Trump held two-thirds of the non-college White group in 2016 and 2020, that group has declined.

That change alone would enlarge Biden’s margin of victory in the two-party vote from 4.6 percentage points to 5.8.  Republicans would need to increase their vote share just to get back to the deficit Trump faced in 2020 – much less to overcome it.  And they are unlikely to achieve the gains possible with minority voters so long as they are stamped so decisively by Trump’s polarizing image.

The change is unevenly distributed around the country, and the warping effect of the Electoral College and the two-senators-per-state rule magnifies the influence of rural states where the non-White impact has been less.

There are 15 battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In each state, the power held by White voters has receded since 2016.

The least-educated states in the US are in the South.  The exception is Virginia, which ranked 6^th in education – and notably, voted for Biden by a margin of 10%.

Trump’s path to victory gets narrower with each passing day.

Biden’s problem is that he is facing a headwind of corporate greed.

I would argue that “Centrists” are not against Biden…unless Centrist is just polite shorthand for saying “corporations”.  The fact that a pro-business tax cut would leave America trillions of dollars in debt is of no concern to the Republicans.  The deficit has never mattered to them.

But it is true that Biden is losing the communications battle against the “replace him” mantra of some six media owners.  When a capitalist like Musk hands Trump $45-million every month, you can bet he is not doing it with the people’s interest at heart. 

Despite his debate performance, to many people Biden’s economic achievements mean more than any health fears during a new four-year term.  The Black caucus, as well as many black voters, see Biden as a president committed to civil rights, unlike his rival, Trump.  He has received support from politicians on the left, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

The decision to step aside is his to make, and he has earned the right to stay in the race if that is his preference. 

The “seer of seers” in election forecasting, Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University in Washington, DC, says he doesn’t think President Joe Biden’s debate performance will have an impact on the outcome of the 2024 election. Lichtman has correctly predicted the winner in the last 10 presidential elections.  He says in fact that replacing Biden could cost Democrats the election.  

“Those calling for Biden to withdraw have zero track record in predicting elections,” says Lichtman.

If Biden is removed, two out of Lichtman’s 13 key factors for victory drop away: the incumbency key and the ‘contest’ key.

“How often has the party holding the White House ever won in an open seat with an uncertain or contested nomination?  The answer is never.”

We should judge by his years as President rather than by 90 minutes of a “debate” – one that Lichtman says was warped by the way the media has been complicit in the way Trump lied and conned his way into the presidency. All the attention was on Biden’s performance, “but Trump’s performance was vastly worse.”   It was based entirely on lies.  Why wasn’t his threat to ignore the results of an election and to seek retribution, in the headlines?

“I wish those who were so quick to dismiss Joe Biden would pay attention to how elections really work.”

He said calls for Biden’s replacement were “foolhardy nonsense.”

The kind of polling calling on Biden to quit is ‘snapshot polling’  the kind that changes rapidly over time. One of the polls even had him improving by a point.

We are at a moment when people have to decide whether there is anything Biden can do that would convince them.

Some publications are coming around.  The Baltimore Sun has just run a powerful calling on people to remember why Biden’s presidency has been excellent.

It references Covid, and how the Biden administration doubled down on previous medical and economic measures, straightening out the last president’s failed supply chain and delivering enough vaccinations to halt the disease’s outbreak.  Ironically, it has just touched Biden personally as it rebounds – and it’s lucky that as it does, Biden (not Trump) is at the helm to stop it again.

The Sun references the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by Biden, to revive America’s roads, trains and ports.  “The last president, a supposed expert in building, never brought such a bill before Congress.”

Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, boosting industrial research and encouraging American companies to bring chip manufacturing stateside.

“Biden also protected the Affordable Care Act, reduced prices on drugs like insulin, stood by Israel when it was attacked, and fought Russian expansionism in Ukraine.”

While it does not deny that Biden is 81 years old, the Sun also points out that Trump “shows tremendous mental and emotional instability at his advanced age.”

It closes by observing the strength of Lichman’s model: “Biden currently enjoys a majority of these points. To quit now would doom another Democratic aspirant. Let’s stick with Biden.”

I am strong for Biden, too, in the sense that someone who has worked so hard and done so much should not be thrown overboard by a few corporate heads who want to get richer, and a few of their Democratic water-carriers.

But if Biden makes a decision -   in light of Covid and his age-  that the stress would be too much for another term, and he wants to step down, we could see a path to Democratic victory that still aligns with Lichtman’s model.

One of our Substack colleagues, DeduceMoi, made a suggestion:

If, for instance, it was VP Kamala Harris who ran in his place, she has many strengths.

She is already ahead of Biden in a face-off with Trump.

She could in a sense check the “incumbency” box.

She had not yet started to campaign, and that could push her up quickly.

She is of course Black, but after Obama that is not an obstacle.  Trump’s White non-college voters would not vote for her anyway, so “Black” is not a weakness.

Being a Woman would be an incredible strength.

This election will be about the abortion vote, and 80% of Americans want that changed.

Only the Governors of a few Red states want it to remain – and in fact they want it to get fiercer and tighter.

Good…they will box themselves in even worse.

A decision is open, of course, for her running-mate VP, who should probably be someone of the Male persuasion, from a different state (Harris is from California, so Newsome is out).

Oddly, there is a weirder possibility: Hillary Clinton actually polls ahead of Kamala. 

Wouldn’t that be a hoot?  A rematch of Hillary and Trump  -  and this time she wins!

And because of the ongoing cases against him, SHE ACTUALLY DOES LOCK HIM UP!

I’d buy popcorn to watch that happen.

The next few days will be very exciting, as we close in on the election that – if it goes the wrong way – could end American democracy.

But Trump has to be reigned in.  In fact, he needs to be imprisoned.

And he will is willing to let many of his followers come to injury to prevent that.

Because he never seems to be affected by the evil that he does.

Till now.