Horse Race Time-- Only One Horse Is On The Track, Señor Trumpanzee... And He's Running Backwards

If Biden is elected and then dies or completes his term without destroying Social Security and Medicare, we will be able to consider ourselves lucky. If whichever monstrosity-- Susan Rice and Kamala Harris being the two most likely-- he picks as vice president doesn't do any structural damage, we'll all be able to let out a collective sigh of relief. Everyone I know-- and a growing majority of polled voters-- wants Trump to lose. Do you know anyone, other than banksters and lobbyists, who actually wants Biden to win? Be honest with yourself. He's the worst candidate the Democrats could have picked because he's going to probably be sworn in as president and we can expect nothing but the worst. Just look at his record from the early 70s on. Still, he passes the lowest bar ever constricted for a presidential election, if just barely. A new poll of likely voters, released this morning by Echelon Insights, shows Trump with just 38% support nationally. According to this poll, he's going to lose by 15 points. But the electorate is not particularly enthused by Biden. The country is ready to vote for him as a vehicle to get rid of Trump but... his favorable/unfavorable rating is split right down the middle:

Coverage of this election is the only way a douche like Biden could win: a referendum on the indisputable worst president in history. Look at this headline from yesterday's Vanity Fair for a story by Peter Hamby: "Trump Couldn't Be More On The Wrong Side: New Poll Shows Trump's Black Lives Matter Protest Response Could Cost Him 2020. Personally, I feel confident that everything about Trump will cost him 2020-- and nothing to do with Biden or the Democrats.

Want to know when someone is a moron? They'll call what's about to happen a "Blue Wave," instead of an anti-Red Wave or anti-Trump Wave or anti-Republican Wave." Even "antifa wave" makes more sense than "Blue Wave," which would suggest that a meaningless party with a tent they would like everyone to cram into, has something to offer than "we're better than Trump," or a little better.

Hamby proposes that Trump made a gigantic tactical error-- not when he came down that escalator in Trump Tower-- but when he decided he was Nixon and would "position himself as the 'law-and-order' president," while, like Nixon he was running a criminal enterprise out of the Oval Office. His violent march from the White House across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal Church has now become "an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. It was so embarrassing and borderline anti-American that one of his generals, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, apologized for participating in the walk and reportedly considered resigning. Like so many of Trump’s decisions, it was a sugar-high tactic designed to please his base and get TV ratings, with almost no thought about the larger sweep of American history... Politically, it was a disaster. In the days that followed, Trump’s approval ratings tumbled to their lowest point in over a year, and their lowest point of the coronavirus pandemic, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Before June, Biden steadily held a four-to-six-point lead over Trump in national polls, fueled in part by massive support among the independent voters whom Trump won in 2016. Shortly after Lafayette Square, though, Biden began to open up an even bigger lead, a nine-point average lead over the president, with a Washington Post–ABC News poll this week showing Biden winning by as many as 15 points.

Biden is a passive recipient of the good luck of having Trump as an opponent. Hamby acknowledges that "Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse." It wasn't, but, again, it had nothing to do with Biden-- other than him standing next to Trump. "Most pollsters say that Trump’s continuing inability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic havoc that’s come with it, has been the dominant factor. And last week, for the first time, polls began to show Biden beating Trump on the question of who would best handle the economy, the only decent card left in Trump’s deck. But if Trump loses in November, the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that erupted in early June have to be seen as a significant breaking point. Not just because they threw an exhausted nation into even more chaos, and not just because they forced Trump into the most astoundingly dumb photo op in presidential history, surpassing George W. Bush’s 'Mission Accomplished!' blunder. In fact, new polling and research provided to Vanity Fair suggests that the protests themselves changed America’s opinions about race so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump unknowingly planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.

"Trump," concluded Hamby, "seems to be doing the work on his own in recent days, by dispatching federal troops to cities like Portland, Chicago, and even Albuquerque to tangle with protesters who, for the most part, have been behaving peacefully for more than a month. As with Lafayette Square, Trump is perversely creating mayhem in the name of law and order, clinging to the apple-pie idea that the 'silent majority' of 1968 is still hiding out somewhere. The country will 'go to hell' if Biden wins, Trump said this week, as if people don’t understand that he’s the one presiding over the chaos. But if [pollster] Avalanche’s research is correct, the silent majority of 2020 is firmly on the side of Biden when it comes to issues of race and justice, and its members walked out of Trump’s community theater Richard Nixon impression many weeks ago."

Philip Bump devoted his latest Washington Post column to the horserace in the swing states, claiming that "Biden is ahead," when, clearly, Biden is barely a factor; Trump is behind.

While Trump and his allies have consistently raised his unexpected victory in 2016 as a reason to dismiss what the polls say, highlighting national polling pointing to a Clinton win in particular, 2020 doesn’t look like 2016 at this point. Biden’s not only outperforming where Clinton was at the end of the election and relative to where she was at the same point in the race-- he’s also outperforming where Barack Obama was nationally and in key swing states in 2008 and 2012.

Using data from RealClearPolitics, we pulled polling averages for 10 states and nationally to compare the 2020 race as it stands with the past four presidential contests. Biden’s doing better than previous Democratic candidates were at this point in the past three contests in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. In Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina, he has leads.

Nationally, his margin against Trump is wider than it was at any point in the final 150 days for Obama in either of his races or for Clinton at any point in the final 150 days of 2016. In each of those contests, the Democrat went on to win the national popular vote.

...If Biden won every swing state that he leads in the RealClearPolitics average, he would lock up about 350 electoral votes, nearly twice what Trump would earn. This assumes wins in close states such as Arizona, Ohio and North Carolina, mind you, but it also assumes he loses states such as Georgia and Texas.

Given Biden’s wide national lead, Biden fares worse in the swing states than he does nationally. Put another way, the contests in the swing states are more favorable for Trump than the national picture.

If we compare how Obama and Clinton were faring with Biden in these same states relative to the national polling at the same time, we get an interesting look at how the current race differs from past ones.

In traditionally red states such as Arizona and Texas, Biden’s faring better relative to the national picture than were Obama and Clinton. (The black line indicates the 2020 margin is generally lower than the red and blue lines representing 2008, 2012 and 2016.) In the blue states Trump picked up in 2016, Biden is faring worse than Obama and Clinton did. (The black line is generally higher than the other lines.)

This is the shift driving national politics at the moment: Densely white, blue-collar states in the Rust Belt are trending more Republican, while, thanks in large part to migration trends, states such as Arizona and Texas are trending more Democratic.

But that the margin in Michigan is more Republican relative to the national picture at the moment than in prior contests obscures the more important point: Biden’s broad national lead makes that less important in terms of winning the state. He’s faring well in the Rust Belt even though the Rust Belt is less heavily Democratic than in past years.

...[T]he national picture has remained fairly stable for the past few weeks, with a three-point spread in the national margin over the past 45 days or so. In 2016, there was a nearly eight-point spread (in part thanks to the GOP convention), and in 2008, the spread was about five points. If things stay relatively static, well, then the picture won’t change that much, by definition.

In short, Trump’s position is wobblier than it was four years ago. It’s wobblier than Mitt Romney’s was in 2012 and even than John McCain’s was in 2008.