John Kerry leads George Bush 49-46 percent of nation-wide LV’s, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos Public Affairs Poll conducted 10/18-20. The poll also found Bush’s approval rating at 47 percent.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 26: Kennedy Now Taking As Many Votes From Trump As From Biden
Polls are showing a subtle but potentially important shift that I discussed at New York:
For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“’He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine,’Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. ‘I love that he is running!’
“Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.”
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFJ Jr. among Trump defectors. And it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
“’If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.’”
One likely reason that Kennedy could be appealing to Republicans is the residual effect from the positive attention he received from conservative media when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primaries; his identification with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories also resonates more positively on the right side of the political spectrum than the left. So it’s in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former president’s sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more ‘radical Left’ than Mr. Biden.”
The idea, of course, is not only to discourage potential Trump voters from drifting toward the independent candidate, but to encourage potential Biden voters to consider a Kennedy vote.
If Kennedy continues to draw votes from both Biden and Trump, each of their campaigns will need to make a strategic decision about how to deal with him: Do you ignore him and count on the usual fade in support afflicting non-major-party presidential candidates as Election Day nears, or do you attack him as too far left (if you’re Trump) or too far right (if you’re Biden) and try to make him a handicap to your major-party opponent? The more aggressive approach has become common among Democrats seeking to intervene in Republican primaries (or in the recent case of the California Senate race, a nonpartisan top-two primary) by loudly attacking candidates they’d prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic — if deployed with some serious dollars — could have an effect on Kennedy’s base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: “If I were a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because he’s frankly more in line with Democrats.”
Trying to minimize losses to Kennedy and maximize opposite-party votes for Kennedy could become a routine practice down the stretch. Where and by whom this strategy is pursued will depend in part on where RFK Jr. is ultimately on the ballot. Right now he has nailed down ballot access in just two states, Utah and Michigan. CBS News reports the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is close to securing a spot on the November ballot in a number of other states:
“Kennedy’s campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan — Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska and Iowa.
“The super PAC supporting Kennedy, American Values 2024, says it has collected enough signatures in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Coping with Kennedy could become a game of three-dimensional chess between the Biden and Trump campaigns. But if it begins to look like RFK Jr. has become an existential threat to Democrats or to Republicans, you can bet they’ll go medieval on him without even a moment’s hesitation.
Demtom,
In answer to your second question, I saw a report a couple of months ago that no incumbent president in the past 80 years (since polling really began) has ever won re-election when the challenger was ahead in the polls at ANY POINT DURING THE CALENDAR YEAR. As we know, Kerry has been ahead in the polls for about half this year.
That same report said no incumbent had ever gone onto re-election when they were not at least 16 points ahead in the polls after their convention. As we know, Bush was up by an average of 4 points after the GOP hatefest.
All in all, not good indicators for the incumbent.
The EMD explanations on polling and its limitations are helpful. But they are far less reassuring that I’d like when virtually all the national polling trends show Bush gaining, not losing…and when many of the key battleground polls show similar trends. I’d sure sleep easier if the trend was reversed, even if Kerry were mathematically behind–but gaining. T.J.
The one thing that seems so clear from all the polls over the last couple weeks is this:
The tide is with us and it is strong.
Demtom:
My view is that what we are seeing is the outcome of seeing Bush during the first debate. Remember prior to that- almost all other exposure to Bush was in an unchallenged situation except the Meet the Press interview where his numbers also fell. This is the realization of really bad news (Iraq, the flu, etc) that demonstrates a common narrative, that this President means well , but is incompetent (kerry’s line that you can be resolute and wrong is perfect). I forget where but there is an excellent post on one of the blogs about how Bush is actually just Carter revisited on the Republican party.
demtom wrote: “has any incumbent president trailed his challenger in ANY poll this close to an election and still managed to win?”
Well there’s Truman, of course. But I don’t think it’s happened since then.
I don’t think we’ve had an election comparable to this one in quite a while, so historical analogies don’t hold much water for me. (I keep hoping for the 1980 analogy to come through, but that may just be wishful thinking.)
I so sick of seeing national polls. With less than two weeks left, I think its time we start focusing solely on the states that matter.
Two things:
1) Does it strike anyone else that most recent polls not only show Bush with approvals that are dangerously low, but that are in most cases his bottom point — e.g., the Time poll had him at 49%, not nearly as good-for-Kerry as the 44-47’s floating around elsewhere, but it’s still the lowest of recent vintage in a poll that had always scored high for him. For many of us, it’s been a source of consternation that, despite accumulating bad news (and public awareness of said news), Bush’s job approval had always remained respectable — at least, compared to his dad and Jimmy Carter. But maybe what we’d been seeing was only a stubborn hanging-on of the post 9/11 haze: that a certain percentage still reflexively gave “approval to the executive in time of war” but nonetheless didn’t really like Bush all that much, and now, with re-election very much in the balance, these voters are expressing their true (lower) opinions for the first time.
2) I’ve asked a variation of this question in the past and never got an acceptable answer. We can all talk about who’s up who’s down, 50% rules, undecided to the challenger, likely voters — but, has any incumbent president trailed his challenger in ANY poll this close to an election and still managed to win?