Patience or panic. Those are the competing impulses among Democrats as the reality sets in that if the election were held today, President Joe Biden would probably lose to former President Donald Trump.
The election is not today but rather nearly a year from now. Democrats counseling caution are quick to note that the polls forecasting Biden’s doom this early out are not predictive by historical standards.
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Based on the last few election cycles, there are questions about how predictive modern public polling is, period. And while Trump outperformed his poll numbers in 2016 and 2020, which would spell trouble for Biden in 2024, Republicans did not do so in the midterm elections last year.
Republicans do well in the polls, the argument goes, but Democrats have won many of the actual elections between last November and this month.
Popular perceptions of the economy could improve over the next year, alleviating a major drag on Biden’s popularity. Trump’s legal problems, which by next November could include at least one criminal conviction, the standard anti-MAGA playbook that has worked so well since 2018, abortion, and other issues could help counteract the forces jeopardizing Biden’s second term even if the public never adopts sunnier economic attitudes.
These are all logical arguments and could very well prove true. But they haven’t convinced everyone.
Prominent Democratic operative and analyst David Axelrod, who remains close to former President Barack Obama and reflective of Obamaworld thinking, has warned that Biden has no better than a 50-50 shot at reelection.
“But no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “He thinks he can cheat nature here, and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”
Axelrod previously mused on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, about Biden giving serious thought to whether he should continue to pursue a reelection campaign.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman went a step further than Axelrod.
“I think Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee,” Ackman told Bloomberg Television. “I do think the right thing for Biden to do is to step aside and to say he’s not going to run and create the opportunity for some competition.”
Part of what is driving this sentiment is that Trump is in their view so manifestly unfit to serve that no viable Democratic nominee should ever trail him.
Yet Biden is 1.9 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The sitting president also trails Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) by 0.8 points and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley by 4.
“In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton for all of five days in the national RealClearPolitics average, each of those days in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention,” election analyst Sean Trende writes. “He led in 29 polls taken over the course of the entire campaign, 10 of which are recorded in the RCP averages as Los Angeles Times/USC tracking polls.”
“In 2020, Trump never led Biden in the national [RealClearPolitics] Average,” Trende continued. “He briefly closed to within four points in early January of 2020, but that is it. He led in five polls all cycle. ... He’s led in more polls in the past three weeks than he did against Biden in all of 2019-2020.”
Moreover, these polling leads have come after two impeachments, the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, inflation no longer running at a 41-year high, multiple indictments and Trump civil trials, and a whole host of things that would render most candidates unelectable.
None of this takes into account how multiple independent and third-party candidates could shape the 2024 race after mostly being a nonfactor in 2020. And while the economy is growing at a robust clip right now, what if things get worse rather than better in the coming months?
And there is still a small chance that a Republican other than Trump will be the party’s presidential nominee. Panicked Democrats wonder what they will do then.
Even if the economy gets better, Biden’s age won’t. Perhaps they will be able to neutralize those concerns with attacks on Trump, who is only a few years younger. But DeSantis and Haley are both decades younger than Biden.
The frightened Democrats are worried that rather than premature predictions of electoral failure, they are seeing early warning signs that Biden is too weak to win. If these numbers don’t soon improve before the polls have better predictive power, it will be too late for a course correction.
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Given the filing deadlines in many primary states as well as the dual challenges of getting both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to step aside, it may already be too late.
That’s why Democrats are left hoping that patience, not panic, is a virtue.