The Weekly Sift

Yes, I’d enjoy seeing polls showing Biden way ahead of Trump. But it’s too soon to worry about such things. There’s more than a year of campaigning still to come.

---

I haven’t wanted to write about the 2024 general election polls, because I don’t think they mean much at this stage, and they’re part of the horse-race framing that I think gets way too much attention in our politics. I mean: Why talk about democracy or climate change or abortion or Ukraine or the economy or the completely senseless government shutdown that will probably start next week — or even about the issues conservatives focus on like the border — when TV’s talking heads could be discussing who’s up and who’s down? Or they could talk about image problems like Biden’s age (but not Trump’s).

But anyway, polls have been getting so much attention in the news that I know you’re thinking about them. It’s hard not to: Just about all the polls show Biden and Trump tied, with one outlier giving Biden a 6% lead and another showing Trump up by 10%. The Trump-favoring polls get more headlines, because they amount to a man-bites-dog story: A guy under multiple indictments who could well spend the rest of his life in jail is the candidate some large number of Americans want as their president.

I know: It’s crazy. Trump lost in 2020 by seven million votes, and that was before he tried to break American democracy, before the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court took away American women’s reproductive rights, and before the summer of weather disasters proved to any reasonable person that climate change is real and serious. How can this race even be close?

The case for Biden. Biden, meanwhile, has been an excellent president. He succeeded in achieving a number of things Trump promised but never accomplished: getting us started rebuilding our roads and bridges and bringing manufacturing back to the US, just to name two. The process of withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan was ugly, but the end result is that we are out of Afghanistan — another thing Trump promised but never delivered.

Trump had left NATO in tatters, with our allies wondering if the US could be counted on to fulfill its treaty obligations. But under Biden’s leadership, NATO has proved resilient against Russian aggression in Ukraine.

After the Covid shutdowns, when governments paid people not to produce — a policy of both the Trump and Biden administrations — inflation has been an issue around the world. But even there, under Biden the US is doing better than comparable economies.

And Biden has accomplished all this without the constant drama of the Trump administration. No nasty tweets. No demeaning nicknames for his opponents. No statements implying that his critics deserve to die or inviting his supporters to get violent. In short: as president, Trump was a constant embarrassment to the United States of America. Biden is not.

Polls. But OK, the polls: Why isn’t this case for Biden resulting in a polling lead? The short answer is that I don’t know, and the news coverage about the polls isn’t helping me figure it out. I’ve seen countless interviews with people who supported Trump in 2020 explaining why they’re standing by him. But he lost in 2020. The only way he can win in 2024 is if people who didn’t vote for him have changed their minds. The news media ought to be searching out those people, but so far they’re not.

Meanwhile, MAGA politicians failed badly in 2022, losing states Trump needs to win back, like Pennsylvania and Georgia. And that trend has continued into 2023: a liberal won a state supreme court election in Wisconsin by a wide margin, and MAGA candidates have continued to lose special elections.

So why hasn’t that trend shown up in the Trump/Biden polls? I have two tentative answers: The first is that so far hardly anyone has been making the case against Trump. You would ordinarily expect the people running against him for the Republican nomination to make that case, but with the exception of Chris Christie, they’re really not.

I have two windows into the primary campaign: My local TV stations are from Boston, and cover much of southern New Hampshire, so if you’re running in the New Hampshire primary, your ads appear in Boston. Also, as a Michigan State graduate, I follow Big Ten football, which means I’ve watched a number of University of Iowa games on the Big Ten network. Those games always include a number of political ads.

So far I have not seen a single attack ad against Trump. Maybe if you do a YouTube search you can find one — I didn’t — but whatever candidate made it is not airing it much.

Meanwhile, Biden has been standing aside while the justice system prosecutes Trump’s crimes. So far, then, the case against Trump has not entered the 2024 campaign. That won’t last. Trump is a very vulnerable candidate, and when those attack ads get made, they will have an effect.

Age. The second thing affecting the polls is that so far, Biden’s age has become the “but her emails” story of 2024.

Yes, Trump may be a felon who tried to stay in power in spite of the voters, and yes, his happy talk at the outset of Covid may have gotten over 100K Americans killed unnecessarily, and yes, reelecting him might lead to the end of American democracy … but Biden is old.

There is almost nothing political reporters can’t turn into a story about Biden’s age. When his campaign rolled out a new wave of TV ads and public appearances, The New York Times described the initiative this way: “As Democratic Jitters Grow, Biden Campaign Tries to Showcase His Vigor.” The paper’s story Monday on Biden’s recent trip to Asia — which even Fox News described as an “all-nighter” — was nevertheless titled, “‘It Is Evening, Isn’t It?’ An 80-Year-Old President’s Whirlwind Trip.” The next day, The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Is Biden Too Old to Run Again? We Asked People Born on His Exact Birthday.” If he shows signs of aging, it makes the front page; if he doesn’t, it’s the occasion for a discussion of how he and his advisers are working to defuse the issue. 

And yes, Biden is three years older than Trump. But he is fit and takes care of himself, while Trump is fat, avoids exercise, and reportedly lives on junk food. [1] Which one do you think is more likely to run into health issues in the next five years? I’d say Trump.

When it comes to stamina, Trump was never a hard worker. He famously started his White House days at 11, and his schedules included lots of down time that he mostly spent watching TV and tweeting.

Cognitively, Biden tends to stumble over words, which he has done all his life. Trump meanders aimlessly, shifts every conversation to his hobby-horse grievances, produces word salads that mean nothing at all, and seems helpless to control his anger issues. If you don’t think Trump has declined, watch this video from the 2015 campaign: Russian spy Maria Butina asks him about Obama’s Russia sanctions, and Trump gives an answer that is both complex and coherent. When was the last time you saw him do anything like that?

Looking forward. So do I think those factors will continue to prop Trump up until the election? No, I don’t. Eventually, Trump attack ads will get made and aired. Having seen what happened in 2016, the public will object to the but-her-emails coverage of Biden’s age. (For now, we should all be adding comments calling out the most egregious articles.) As the campaign goes forward, it will be harder to maintain the myth of Biden’s senility. And as Trump goes to trial, the public will see that the charges against him are more than just politics.

And a year from now, when the fall campaign is really happening, voters will tune in. A lot of them will want to know what these candidates intend to do for them. Biden has a vision and a record of accomplishment. Trump does not. Ultimately, that’s going to count.

---

[1] A frequent topic of discussion on my social media feeds is whether pictures like this are “fat shaming” Trump, which is a no-no. But if we’re honestly talking about longevity issues, weight is relevant. And we have to use pictures, because Trump lies about the numbers.