Joe Biden’s fortunes have looked grim for a while now in national polling. As my New York Post column detailed ahead of his prime-time Israel speech on Thursday:

A recent CNBC poll showed disapproval of Biden’s presidency hitting a record-high 58% and his approval rating at 37%. . . . Recent polls from CNN, Quinnipiac and Harris all show Biden’s approval below 40%, his disapproval at 56% or higher or both. The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows a grim record of disapproval of Biden’s handling of one issue after another: 60% on the economy, 64% on inflation, 64% on immigration, 57% on foreign policy, 57% on crime and 53% on Ukraine. When you’re losing at home, losing at the border and losing abroad, that doesn’t leave many places left.

Presidential elections, however, are not held on a national basis, but state by state. There are, as Nate Cohn detailed in the New York Times in September, reasons from polling, the 2020 election, and the 2022 midterm results to believe that the Republican advantage in the Electoral College (relative to the national popular vote) that helped Donald Trump win in 2016 has been eroding, due in good part to the unpopularity of Trump in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

But Democrats shouldn’t get cocky. Even if they draw their desired opponent in Trump, Biden is now struggling so badly in key swing states that he may yet be vulnerable even to Republicans’ weakest candidate. That’s the lesson of a Morning Consult poll released Thursday, covering Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the seven closest states in 2020, which include the four closest states in 2016. Trump leads Biden in five of the seven states and is tied in Michigan, trailing only in Nevada. Aggregating across all seven states, Trump leads 47 percent to 43 percent, and leads among men, women, and every age bracket. Trump leads 53 percent to 38 percent among white voters — actually a soft result for Trump — but he gets 22 percent of black voters, 38 percent of Hispanics to Biden’s 46 percent, and trails by just a point (43 percent to 42 percent) among other ethnic groups such as Asian and South-Asian Americans and Native Americans. Biden loses 14 percent of his 2020 support (five points of which goes to Trump), while Trump, even after January 6 and all that, loses just 9 percent of his 2020 support.

The real divide in the poll is class: Trump leads Biden by 14 points among non-college-educated voters, trails by eight among college grads, and trails Biden by 29 among people with graduate and professional degrees. The reason is not hard to locate: By a 49 percent to 26 percent margin, voters say Bidenomics is bad for the economy (the rest were unsure or undivided). Only 56 percent of current Biden supporters said Bidenomics was good. Voters were asked about who they trusted more on ten different economic issues, ranging from taxes to inflation to jobs, and Trump beats Biden on all ten.

There are a lot of caveats here, of course. First, the poll didn’t test other Republican candidates. Second, there were a lot of undecided voters, suggesting that there remains a lot of room for persuasion by the campaigns. Trump doesn’t crack 50 percent in any of the swing states, and reaches 48 percent in only one of them (Georgia). A poll showing a 43–43 tie in Michigan is not great news for Republicans; there’s a very long history of early Michigan polls showing competitive statewide races with a lot of undecideds in races that Democrats ended up winning easily. The Democrats have a tested and successful playbook for turning out voters who already hate Trump. Third, while Biden undoubtedly has problems with working-class and blue-collar non-white voters, especially men, I will believe results like “Republicans get 22 percent of the black vote” when I actually see them happen in the real world.

But while those are all reasons to treat these results as preliminary, they absolutely tell us that current voter sentiment is very sour toward Joe Biden and his economic record as compared to that of his predecessor. And if Republicans don’t nominate Trump, Biden’s campaign will be in even deeper trouble.