On any given day, you can find a poll that bodes ill for President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump. Whichever one loses in November may be the worst loser in the history of American politics.
Biden has no doubt seen the worst of it in most polls. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday put the president’s approval rating at 36%, tied for his record low set in July 2022. He has consistently been trailing Trump in swing states over the last few months, as he ignores or botches the handling of issues that voters care about, such as the economy or border security.
It is not smooth sailing for Trump, though. The former president is losing support from rural men and white men without college degrees in Wisconsin, two constituencies that were supposed to be among his strengths. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, he is only up 0.1 percentage points in Wisconsin, 1 in Michigan, and 2.1 in Pennsylvania. He would need at least one of those three states to win even if he takes the other battleground states, meaning he is just a good couple of months for Biden away from blowing those leads and losing in November.
That is unless the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helps Trump flip New Hampshire, which goes back to Biden’s glaring weaknesses.
On the one hand, Biden is old, wildly unpopular, and trailing the man he beat in 2020 despite the advantage one would assume an incumbent president typically has. On the other hand, Trump is also old and unpopular, has already lost to Biden before, and has not built the demanding lead a candidate should have over someone with Biden’s numbers. Trump has been a drag on Republicans in every election cycle since 2016, and Biden is a career loser at the national level who lucked into the presidency in 2020. Neither party could give itself a more difficult election if it tried.
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Both the GOP and the Democratic Party went full speed ahead with fatally flawed candidates in hopes that their loser will lose less than the other’s loser. One party will have to be correct, but the other will have committed one of the biggest self-inflicted injuries in politics. It will be hard to find a bigger loser than whoever takes the loss in November between Biden or Trump because that loss will have been avoidable by simply choosing a candidate who isn’t old and unpopular with a history of losing.
It is the one silver lining to an otherwise terrible presidential election. Hopefully, at least one party can return to a semblance of sanity, in the Democrats’ case, or prioritize winners who actually make changes, in the case of the GOP.