If the 2024 election were held today, it might go to an aspiring authoritarian who spent part of a weekend campaign rally waxing fondly about fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. According to a new set of New York Times/Siena surveys, one of which was conducted with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Biden is also losing support among younger and nonwhite voters, voting demographics that formed a crucial component of his winning coalition four years ago. According to the polls, the president leads Trump in only one of six battlegrounds—Wisconsin. Biden’s standing improves when the polling is narrowed to likely voters. If he prevails in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all of which are within the margin of error—he would likely win reelection. But his numbers look especially grim in the Sun Belt, where the surveys have him behind Trump by seven points in Arizona, by ten points in Georgia, and by a whopping 12 points in Nevada, which Democrats haven’t lost in 20 years.
The normal caveats apply: Polls are only snapshots—and are often blurry. And while the political world has already pivoted to general election mode, it may be too early for much of the general electorate to have tuned in: “The reality is that many voters are not paying close attention to the election and have not started making up their minds,” as Democratic pollster Geoff Garin put it to the Guardian.
Meanwhile, Trump, whose presidency was a deluge of chaos and disaster, is running on an even more authoritarian agenda this time around, is currently on trial for allegedly falsifying business records for political gain, and is acting somehow even more bizarrely and unbalanced than before. So, the concern, of course, is that all this work Biden is doing—both on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office, where he has notched a number of significant policy accomplishments that have eluded his predecessors—hasn’t seemed to be reflected at this point in polls.
Some of this seems to reflect the anger among segments of the Democratic coalition over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas War. But the new polling also suggests that some dissatisfaction may run deeper than a single policy dispute with the president: Though a majority in the Times’ polling still said they preferred a candidate who would “bring politics in Washington back to normal,” an even larger majority—close to 70 percent of respondents—said the country’s economic and political systems needed major reform or even to be “torn down entirely.” To an electorate looking for a wrecking ball, Trump’s chaos and nascent authoritarianism may seem like an asset.
Is that really the electorate, though? Biden subscribes to a more optimistic view—that the public is too decent and normal to elect Trump again and that his strong primary performances compared with Trump mean more than some imperfect polls. “I know a lot of people like to look at the polls,” the president said at a campaign function in Washington state on Saturday. “But I look at the actual votes.”
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