The polls increasingly show President Joe Biden could lose his reelection bid next year, despite deep Republican dysfunction and generally positive economic data.

Democrats have so far been split between two reactions: panic and denial.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY ELDERS SOUND THE ALARM ON BIDEN

Let’s first discuss denial. Given the sorry state of public polling in 2023, it’s possible the polls are wrong. They are certainly early, more than a year out from the 2024 election, which is certainly too soon to be predictive.

Some will even argue that the polls are “skewed” against Biden, which is usually the hallmark of a losing campaign’s supporters. Remember how well “unskewing” the polls worked for Mitt Romney in 2012, at a time when there were serious reasons to at least question whether President Barack Obama would be able to replicate his minority and millennial support from 2008 (spoiler alert: he was).

The unskewers are themselves split on who benefits from excessively pessimistic polling: fellow Democrats who want to ditch Biden as the nominee in 2024 — hello Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) fans! — and Republicans hoping to demoralized lower-turnout Democratic voting blocs.

Leaving aside the likelihood that the New York Times can be easily enlisted in such chicanery on behalf of the GOP, the polls suggest that lower-turnout Democratic voting blocs are already plenty demoralized.

There is a simpler reason for why Biden is trailing would-be Republican opponents, including and perhaps especially former President Donald Trump.

Just because the inflation rate has begun trending downward doesn’t mean that the cost of living isn’t still high compared to just a few years ago, easily within living memory for the overwhelming majority of voters. Moreover, the two things curtailing inflation are interest rate hikes that also contribute to a negative assessment of the economy and the inability of Democrats to pass massive, base-pleasing spending bills for at least the duration of the Republican-controlled House.

Meanwhile, Trump can argue that most of the things that are good about the current economy — low unemployment and fairly robust GDP growth — were good when he was president, with the exception of during the pandemic. The things that are bad, inflation and high interest rates, were not happening under Trump.

Democrats might say that “with the exception of during the pandemic” is a caveat comparable to “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” But the adverse economic effects of the pandemic, especially high unemployment, were at least as much a product of the lockdowns as the virus itself. Gov Ron DeSantis (R-FL) can plausibly run to the right of Trump on COVID-19 lockdowns. Biden can’t.

And if we had a resurgence of the virus, who would be more likely to lock down the economy a second time? Again, DeSantis can hit Trump for listening to Anthony Fauci in the first place. Biden cannot do so with a straight face.

This is all possibly made worse by the fact that Democrats mostly dodged a bullet in the midterm elections, unlike Clinton and Obama. They did not sufficiently take out their anger at Biden with Democrats in the midterms and might now direct it at him in the presidential election.

Biden can try to run on the positive aggregate economic data — GDP grew by nearly 5% in the third quarter, which is undeniably impressive, especially in this interest-rate environment — but that isn’t really responsive to the reasons voters are saying the economy is bad. And while inflation is going down, prices aren’t returning to pre-Biden levels.

Consider a precedent from the not-too-distant past. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 against the worst economy since the Great Depressions. The incumbent, George H.W. Bush, presided over the 1990-91 recession. That recession was officially over in March 1991, before Clinton even formally declared his candidacy.

Bush and the Republicans pounded the table with this economic data. The economy actually grew a strong 4.8% in the fourth quarter of 1992 and a not-terrible 2.7% in the third quarter, which covered the period of time in which people were voting.

At a town hall debate featuring all three candidates for president, a young woman asked Bush how “the deficit” affected him personally. She clearly meant the economy more broadly. Bush at first seemed offended about the implication that his personal wealth somehow shielded him from the consequences of the deficit, then went into a talk about the impact on interest rates. Clinton felt her pain and hit his answer out of the park.

Bush wasn’t running during the worst economy since the Great Depression and Biden won’t any longer be dealing with inflation running at a 41-year high. But the listless job market from the 1990-91 recession was still a problem long after it was over, and so are the high prices and high interest rates that sprung from inflation in 2021-22.

There is also the matter of Biden’s age (Bush was also 22 years older than Clinton and the Democrat represented generational change). Unlike the economy, there is no prospect of those numbers getting better for Biden.

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All this adds up to an octogenarian lecturing you that the economy is better than you think it is, running against younger candidates (albeit only very slightly in Trump’s case) who agree with you that things are tough.

That doesn’t mean Biden can’t win, but it isn’t a prescription for victory.