Looking into the reasons for Republican triumphalism and Democratic pessimism in the 2024 presidential contest, I identified and challenged one factor at New York:

Beneath all the noise about Trump riding high is some actual empirical evidence that’s he’s improving on his 2020 performance. That’s most obvious in national popular-vote estimates: Trump lost by 4.5 percent in 2020 and is leading, albeit modestly, in 2024 national polls. But it’s also evident in particular states where he didn’t do well at all last time around. Lately, there’s a lot of buzz about Trump being competitive in supposedly deep-blue Virginia, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Whether Virginia backs Donald Trump or Joe Biden shouldn’t even be a discussion.

“The state hasn’t backed a Republican for president since George W. Bush in 2004.

“But early polls showing Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, cutting into the Democratic president’s lead have served as a wake-up call for Virginia Democrats, who acknowledge headwinds with voters dissatisfied with Biden’s leadership. Republicans say that if Virginia is even remotely on the table for Trump, Biden is in serious trouble in traditional battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

Underlying this Republican excitement are two polls, one from Fox News in June and another from Roanoke College in May, showing Trump and Biden tied in the Old Dominion. While that’s hardly a big dataset, it is indeed eyebrow-raising: In 2020, all but one public poll of Virginia taken after May showed Biden with a double-digit lead, and he ultimately won by 10 percent. Virginia was also carried by Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012 and by Hillary Clinton in 2016. So it’s a blue state turning purple, and some would say that has big implications for the rest of the country!

Unfortunately for this take, short-term trends in particular states don’t always mean a lot. I’m old enough to remember that before Obama won Virginia in 2008, the state went Republican for 11 straight presidential elections. It was the only state of the former Confederacy to go against Jimmy Carter twice. Big-time national losers George H.W. Bush (in 1992) and Bob Dole (in 1996) won there. Biden’s double-digit win in 2020, moreover, reflected a fairly sudden Democratic surge: Obama won the state by less than his national popular-vote margin in 2008 and by exactly his national margin in 2012; Clinton won Virginia by a hardly overwhelming 5 percent.

Obviously, if Trump actually wins Virginia, it would be a big deal, putting 13 precious electoral votes he’s never won before into his column. But a tightened margin in any given state really just means the favored party will have to decide whether to put resources there that had been earmarked for states previously thought of as battlegrounds. If there’s a national shift, it’s likely to be reflect in national polls, and there Trump’s lead doesn’t look like the stuff of landslides (0.8 percent in the current RealClearPolitics averages of head-to-head polls).

The reality is that we may not know what the 2024 battleground landscape will ultimately look like until a lot closer to Election Day. Don’t forget that the identity of the closest states can and does change. Florida was the ultimate battleground state of all time in 2000; now it’s considered reliably red. That’s even truer of Iowa and Ohio; the latter is where the 2004 presidential election was decided, and the former was dead even in 2000 and 2004 before lurching toward Democrats in the two Obama elections and then massively toward Trump in 2016 and 2020. And it’s not just newly red states that have changed complexions: In living memory, New York, California, and Hawaii were presidential battleground states.

Is there a theory as to why Trump might be doing significantly better in Virginia without it necessarily signaling a big national lead? Yes, actually. National polls are showing Trump making gains among young and non-white non-college-educated voters, and Biden making gains among white college-educated voters. This may shift each candidate’s vote share in various states without flipping them, as Sean Trende recently noted:

“One doesn’t have to be gifted with a particularly vigorous imagination to see what could happen here: Trump has substantial improvements among non-white voters, driving gains in some red areas (like Texas) and flipping some important swing states. He also makes gains in some blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, California, and New York, but is unable to flip them because the hole with educated whites is just too deep. Then, in relatively white Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan, very little changes.”

So the widespread assumption of a built-in Republican advantage in the Electoral College may actually be outmoded. You can’t look at Trump’s small lead in national polls and assume this means he’s far ahead in the race for EVs that really matters, as Trende points out:

“The result could easily be Trump winning the popular vote, but Biden eking out a narrow 270-268 Electoral Vote victory … It’s a really narrow road to victory for the former president right now, but it is also a perfectly plausible path.”

So perhaps MAGA folk should hold off on the premature victory celebrations, in Virginia and elsewhere. The shape of the election is still developing.

I have no authority to shut down idle pundit speculation about something weird happening at the Democratic National Convention in August (or even later in the election cycle), but would prefer a little deference to reality, as I noted at New York:

One of the more tedious phenomena of this election year has been the chronic pundit talk of Joe Biden “stepping aside” as presidential nominee and Democrats replacing him with Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or some other sort of fantasy candidate. One of many reasons this scenario made little sense is that should something happen to convince the president to abruptly end his reelection campaign, he’s already chosen a stand-in who is very close by: his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Obviously, anyone willing to overlook Biden’s clear determination to stick it out this year can imagine Harris “stepping aside” — or being shoved aside — as well. But there’s really no evidence that the Democrats who would make this decision (the Biden-Harris loyalists who serve as convention delegates or on the Democratic National Committee) feel this way at all. And now there’s evidence that rank-and-file Democrats have the veep’s back.

While a new Politico–Morning Consult poll with data about Harris shows that she shares her boss’s general election vulnerability, Democrats remain bullish on her. Seventy-four percent think she’d make a good president. By a 59 percent to 31 percent margin, they think she could win a 2024 general election. She’s stronger than Biden among the Black and Latino voters that have been stressing Democrats in recent years. And in terms of early 2028 preferences among Democrats, she’s far ahead of the competition (Harris is at 41 percent; Pete Buttigieg is at 15 percent; Newsom is at 14 percent; Whitmer is at 5 percent). Harris is already the principal voice of her administration and her party on the GOP threat to abortion rights, which will very likely become a more prominent issue as November approaches. She’s not going anywhere.

None of this means that Democrats would want Harris to replace Biden, or that they might not harbor fears about Harris facing Trump. Bigots would definitely be mobilized by the prospect of a half-Black, half–Asian American woman (and one with a Jewish husband!) in the White House. But the idea that Democrats are ready to abandon her or Biden simply has no basis in verifiable fact.

If, for some unforeseeable reason, Biden is incapacitated or decides to pack it in before November, Kamala Harris, for better or for worse, will be the Democratic candidate, period, full stop. Barring any clear evidence to the contrary, it’s time to forget about the fantasy tickets.

 

I’ve been wondering for a while about the wildly varying poll numbers for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the more I learn the more I think his standing will soon fade, as I explained at New York:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. needs just one more really strong poll showing to meet part of CNN’s criteria for participation in its June 27 presidential debate. The network stipulates that participants secure at least 15 percent in four national surveys no later than June 20 from a specific list of approved pollsters, and Kennedy has three (a Quinnipiac poll and a CNN poll in April, and a Marquette Law School poll in May). He may still fail to make the stage because CNN also requires that participants be on the ballot in states representing at least 270 electoral votes, and the Kennedy campaign is in a fight it may not win over how ballot access is confirmed. But still, the idea that Kennedy is polling as well as any non-major-party candidate since Ross Perot is a good advertisement for his viability.

There are, however, two reasons Kennedy’s standing in the race may be significantly overstated by the best of his polls. The first is a matter of history and, well, common sense: as Election Day nears, voters begin to focus on the most viable options and become less likely to “waste their votes” on candidates with slim odds of actually winning. So even the strongest of non-major-party presidential candidates in living memory — Perot in 1992 and 1996, John Anderson in 1980, and George Wallace in 1968 — all lost ground by late summer of the election year and finished well below their peak in polls. It’s one key reason RFK Jr. is frantic to get into a debate with the Democratic and Republican nominees (as Perot, the strongest indie candidate ever, did in 1992); he needs a game-changing development to forestall the otherwise inevitable late-cycle swoon.

But there’s another reason that polls showing Kennedy in the mid-to-high teens could overstate his actual support: They are counterbalanced by other polls showing him performing much more poorly. Indeed, all three June polls testing five major- and minor-party candidates (Biden, Trump, Kennedy, Cornel West, and Jill Stein) place RFK Jr. a lot lower: 6 percent at Emerson, 4 percent at Yahoo News, and 3 percent at Economist/YouGov.

Why are there such wild gyrations in Kennedy’s standing in the polls? There’s no infallible answer, but the New York Times’ Ruth Igielnik offered a persuasive explanation last month: Question order in presidential polls has a big effect on non-major-party candidates:

“[M]any reputable pollsters ask both versions of the question: one that poses a simple head-to-head contest between major-party candidates, and one that includes third-party candidates who may be on the ballot.

“And which question gets asked first is where the difference comes in. …

“Our experiment worked like this: All respondents were shown both the long and short questions, but half were shown the full list first, and the other half were first shown the two-way race.

“Among those who saw the long list first, Mr. Kennedy garnered 7 percent of the vote.

“But among those respondents who encountered the head-to-head contest before seeing the full list, Mr. Kennedy’s support shot up six percentage points to 13 percent.”

That’s a very big difference. What explains it?

“[I]t is at least partly related to a phenomenon that pollsters call expressive responding. This is when people might use a survey response to show their frustration or express a particular feeling that’s not exactly what is being asked.

“In this case, many respondents seem to be using the second question to convey frustration with the choices for president in the first question, whether or not their answers reflect their full views.”

As you probably know, frustration “with the choices for president” is famously high this year. Igielnik goes on to show that most of the recent polls showing Kennedy with double-digit support are those that ask first about the head-to-head Biden-Trump contest before including the other candidates in a second question, while those that present the full list of candidates right off the bat tend to show much lower support for the conspiracy theorist with the famous name.

When voters actually vote, of course, they are going to see the full list of candidates without first encountering some frustrating presentation of the major-party choices alone. So the odds are good that Kennedy will underperform his best polls. Indeed, putting together the two factors we’ve discussed, it’s not surprising to learn that RFK Jr.’s standing in the RealClearPolitics polling averages has steadily drifted downward from nearly 17 percent last November to 13 percent as recently as March to 8.6 percent today. Defying history by making a serious run at Biden and Trump will take a lot of doing for Kennedy and isn’t a very good bet.

Examining the evidence we have so far about the impact of Trump’s criminal conviction, I’m becoming worried that Democrats are assuming too much about Trump’s vulnerabilities, so I wrote a warning at New York:

For months now, many political observers have stared at polls that show Donald Trump with a modest lead over Joe Biden and have placed a mental thumb on the scales for the incumbent due to “Trump’s legal problems.” This was particularly common (and justifiable) back when it looked as though Trump could be on trial for multiple criminal charges in different cases before Election Day. And even when it turned out the (arguably) weakest case against him was the only one that would reach fruition before November, the available evidence and plain logic suggested that being officially branded as a “convicted criminal” could knock Trump’s candidacy off-balance in a serious way.

Anyone holding their breath to see if a guilty verdict in the Trump hush-money trial would impact the election can now exhale. While it’s possible to look at the data and see a glass that is half-empty or half-full, the overall indication is that Trump’s conviction has not changed the race. And on balance, that’s good for the 45th president.

Yes, the “story” that emerged from a Manhattan courtroom on May 30 has concluding chapters yet to come, particularly on July 11 when Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Trump. And we can anticipate hundreds of millions of dollars in paid messages from the Biden campaign reminding voters the president’s opponent is a felon. But in a way, that’s a partial victory for Trump since it reinforces his campaign’s argument that his indictment, trial, and conviction in the hush-money case were a piece of partisan jobbery and not a legitimate criminal proceeding at all. Ideally, the Biden campaign would have liked the conviction to speak for itself without any goosing from a White House that stands accused (without a bit of documentation) of orchestrating the entire prosecution.

In other words, facts aside, Trump’s conviction and his overall status as a man perpetually on the wrong side of the law are being perceived through partisan lenses, which in turn will tend to encourage unaffiliated voters to discount them. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it’s reality.

What this means more broadly is that Trump may once again defy expectations based on the available precedents. This has happened an awful lot in the man’s relatively short but eventful career in elected politics, beginning with the moment when many of us were certain that career was about to abruptly end — when he blithely disrespected the very sacred cow of America’s favorite POW war hero, John McCain, and paid no price for it.

You can argue all day about why Trump seems to be “Teflon Don” or even conclude that it’s not about him but about his feckless opponents in both parties or about an atmosphere of partisan polarization (to which he has definitely and self-servingly contributed) that nothing can penetrate. But whatever it is, we’re in a presidential contest that appears to be all but impervious to the kinds of things that used to be called “game changers.” It’s time to accept at least as a rebuttable presumption that the game isn’t changing. And that has implications for future events like the presidential debates, the two major-party conventions, and the cut-and-thrust of the campaign competition as the November election grows nigh.

That doesn’t mean Trump’s going to win, to be clear. “Convicted criminal” or not, he remains relatively very unpopular: He’s incapable of moderating his savage and vengeful message, and this year’s turnout dynamics could make Biden’s base of support more reliable. And Trump’s polling lead, even though it has induced regular panic in some Democratic ranks, has never been more than a few ticks away from vanishing altogether. But no one should expect Trump to self-destruct or persuadable voters to wake up some morning and realize what a terrible man he is.

If, late on Election Night, Trump appears on TVs and computer screens as the president-elect of the United States, as he did to the horror of Blue America in 2016 — or worse yet, if he loses and claims victory anyway as he did in 2020 — no one should be that surprised. We’ve been here before.

In the wake of Trump’s criminal conviction, a rather obvious contrast between the two parties occurred to me that Democrats ought to think about. I wrote about it at New York.

One of the most notable aspects of the 2024 presidential contest has been how often voices have been raised in the left-of-center commentariat calling on Democrats to abort Joe Biden’s reelection campaign before it’s too late. In February, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein created an enormous buzz with a podcast episode suggesting that Biden “step aside” and let his party choose a more electable (and non-octogenarian) nominee. My colleague Jonathan Chait has discussed this possibility as well. And the idea was raised again quite recently by polling-maven-turned-pundit Nate Silver.

I’m on record as raining on this particular parade for multiple reasons, including the overreaction to marginally adverse polls it represents, the extremely unlikely Biden self-defenestration it would require, and the lack of any Democratic consensus on a “replacement” nominee. But if it’s odd how many Democrats have proved ready to panic and consider previously unimaginable survival strategies after a few bad polls, it’s downright weird that there is no such talk in Republican ranks after that party’s presumptive presidential nominee was found guilty of 34 felony criminal charges. Might that prove to be a problem in November? And if so, might Republicans, who frequently complain that the nation cannot survive another four years of Joe Biden as president, do well to choose someone from their own “bench” who has somehow managed never to be indicted for and convicted of a crime?

The very idea of Trump “stepping aside” or being pushed aside is laughable, of course. Whatever else he is, the 45th president is convinced he’s the most indispensable man in American — and perhaps world — history. After a hostile takeover in 2016 he has imposed an iron grip on the Republican Party that has clearly tightened after Trump demolished a large field of rivals this year. Nonetheless, the fact that these rivals even ran for president betrays the existence, however weak and attenuated, of an undercurrent of doubt about the wisdom of a third straight Trump nomination. But no one in GOP circles — absolutely no one — is articulating it now that there is a major objective reason for worry. Indeed, Team Trump’s savage reaction to prize Senate candidate Larry Hogan’s mild re-verdict suggestion of respect for the legal process that led to it shows how little grumbling will be tolerated. The two major parties couldn’t be much farther apart in this respect.

It is true there is one legitimate reason Republicans might not consider reconsidering Trump even if he and his supporters would allow it: Unlike Democratic delegates who are loosely bound to the candidate under whose banner they were chosen, Republican Trump delegates are formally and in some states legally bound to back the former president unless he explicitly releases them. A convention revolt against Trump (again, a laughable proposition) would require an overwhelming consensus of the party leaders Trump himself has chosen. So there’s not much point in talking about it, particularly since that would call down upon the doubters thunderbolts from Mar-a-Lago.

But in the end, the difference between Democrats and Republican in dealing with the problems facing their flawed 2024 presidential nominees is that unlike Trump himself, Republicans don’t seem to value winning above all else. Yes, he is a formidable politician with great strengths harnessed to great weaknesses, and yes, there’s no evidence yet the verdict in Manhattan is significantly eroding his consistent lead over Biden in most polls. But Republicans should rightly fear that day after day and week after week of Team Biden branding Trump as a convicted felon will eventually have an effect. Without question, years and years of data show Trump is as unpopular a politician as Biden, and if he did somehow “step aside,” Republicans could easily find a nominee better able to dispatch the unpopular incumbent. Republicans do not, moreover, have the kind of succession problem facing Democrats in the form of a sitting vice-president who is as unpopular as her boss.

Republicans are in unshakable solidarity with Donald Trump despite his criminal record because they truly don’t see an alternative path. And that’s true even if they privately fear he will lead them to defeat, and after that, to another denial of defeat that could end in another attempted insurrection or at a minimum in horrific civil discord. For all their famed irresolution, proneness to panic, and “bed-wetting” tendencies, Democrats still belong to a party where free speech is possible. If their nominee was convicted of multiple felonies, at least some Democrats would be looking actively and publicly for a replacement. But Republicans belong to a cult of personality where any hint of rebellion is punished ruthlessly. And that’s the party that will take power with Trump if he manages to get back into the White House.