John Kerry leads George Bush 50 to 41 percent of New Hampshire LV’s, according to a Center for Applied Public Opinion Research Poll conducted 10/18-21 for Franklin Pierce College. The poll scored Bush’s approval rating at 45 percent.
John Kerry leads George Bush 50-48 percent of Florida LV’s, according to a SurveyUSA Poll conducted 10/22-24.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 20: What Biden Should Say If He “Steps Aside”
In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:
The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.
So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?
I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.
The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.
As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.
Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.
For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.
A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.
phatcat — thanks for the statistical analysis. That kind of work is beyond my abilities. I intend to savor the salt of a Kerry victory long after November 2.
KerryWillWin — thanks for raising the obvious question. You do a better job of supporting my suspicious question, which centered on the strangeness of undecideds breaking for Kery in New Hampshire but not elsewhere.
Matt: If undecideds are supposedly breaking to Bush at 5:1, how come Kerry’s lead is GROWING there this week after last week it was declared a tossup.
Take the undecided voter issue with several heaping handfuls of salt. The report makes the case that undecided voters in NH (7.9% of the sample) are leaning heavily Bush, and that the Bush campaign should be heartened that this is really a close race.
Not only does this not pass the common sense test of the Incumbent Rule, it doesn’t pass the survey analysis integrity test. If 7.9% of the respondents are undecided voters, that translates to an undecided sample size of 36. That’s an extremely small sample size, and prone to ridiculous levels of sampling error (+/- 16). Strangely, the report mentions strong Bush approval ratings among undecideds, but doesn’t publish the actual number. In any case, if Bush polls a 60% approval rating, all we know is that his actual approval rating is somewhere between 44% and 76%, which is hardly enlightening.
With sample sizes this small, drill downs become nonsensical and I’m very surprised they tried to use the undecideds to make a case that Bush has hope in this poll. If anything, the poll is even worse than it appears for Bush, since the sample overrepresented Republicans by 5 points (unless the results were weighted, but they make no mention of it). If the results were weighted to reflect actual party ID patterns, Bush would be down even more.
I agree with Green Dems assessment also. I think Kerry republicans will get the ball over the net for our guy on Nov. 2. The dynamics of the race haven’t changed that much for several months despite poll gyrations: Democrats are highly motivated and they are all in Kerry’s court. Republicans are split. Christian conservatives and rural republicans will vote for Bush come hell or high water, but common sense republicans will split three ways: 1) hold their noses and vote Bush, 2) hold their noses and vote Kerry, or 3) stay home. Factor into this mix the liklihood that first time voters and independents are trending to Kerry, and you have a Kerry win. Actually, I think the only unanswered question at this point is – will it be a Kerry squeaker, or a solid Kerry win. The proof of this can clearly be seen watching Bush yesterday begging his base to get out and vote.
Clinton showed the way, that Democrats who seek to represent Middle Class Americans are the ones who get a chance to help lesser Americans.
We didn’t invent the DLC merely for the hell of it. You have to plow that middle ground to win.
I therefore agree with Green Democrat’s assessment about the chance for new alliances. Assuming a Kerry victory, the Republican party implodes. While success has a thousand fathers, failure is a bastard, and everyone will be looking for THAT baby’s daddy.
Meanwhile, the Repubs who are annoyed at the rightwing freakazoids will clamor to Arnold, McCain, and Rudy to retake the party for 08.
Need to drill down in the New Hampshire poll. Undecided voters are breaking for Bush by a ratio of 5 to 1. Is the undecided vote breaking to Bush in any other state?
Kerry’s strength in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire suggests (not surprisingly) that more fiscally conservative and culturally laissez faire Republicans may be trending Dem. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention, of course. This is not your father’s Republican Party anymore. The GOP of limited government, individual liberty, and personal resposnibility is finished, replaced by a big government, fiscally irresponsible Christian conservatism at home and a belligerent and messianic interventionism abroad.
I suspect that collaboration between Democrats and moderate libertarians could prove enduring, but I worry that the so-called war on terror combined with the GOP’s new love of populism could put white working class voters solidly in their column for a generation, and draw in enough Hispanics with such an agenda to make it a lock. Although, with Kerry doing so well among independents (and apparently now new voters) that might just be paranoia…
Is this the same SurveyUSA that has a 22 point lead for Bush in Tennessee? I’m not sure I trust that outfit. I think Rasmussen’s Florida Bush trend makes more sense–steadily dropping from a high of a little over fifty and flatlining at 47 or so. (Or about where he was six weeks ago.)