Why trump can’t win

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Election handicapper Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, on Monday called on President Biden to reassure voters he is capable of running a campaign.

Otherwise, Silver said, Biden should step aside ahead of the August nominating convention and let the party select a new candidate.

“Biden needs to reassure the American public that he’s capable of handling public appearances that aren’t on easy mode. Or he needs to stand down. Or he’s probably going to lose to Trump,” Silver wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

In a Substack post also published Monday, Silver sharply criticized Biden and his team for shielding the president from the media spotlight, in particular for forgoing the Super Bowl interview...

I still have faith in the american people; I don't feel they would allow Trump anywhere near the white house.

It's horrifying, but he has a real chance of winning. Biden is seen as a weak and not very desirable candidate. Democrats win when there is enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate, and there isn't for Biden, although he has done a number of good things and is more progressive than previous, recent Democratic presidents.

My hope is that while Trump's base will stick with him no matter what, the moderate voters, who are the ones who swing elections, might be sufficiently disgusted with him that they won't vote for him. The outcome of the election is decided in a few swing states. Hopefully there are enough reasonable people in those states who will vote for Biden as the only viable alternative to Trump.

1) Democrats have been outperforming polls in all kinds of elections since the Dobbs decision and will continue to do so.
Late last month, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein hosted veteran Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg to make the case for why Democrats should not be flipping out about the polls. Rosenberg’s very vocal and public position that 2022 wasn’t going to be a red-wave election has earned him near-mythical status in certain Democratic circles of the kind that was once enjoyed by former FiveThirtyEight data guru Nate Silver. “Democrats keep overperforming in elections,” Rosenberg said. He noted that Democrats did much better than expected in the midterms, as well as in the small number of significant races in 2023. He added that “when we actually go vote, we just keep winning, and they keep losing. And so I go into 2024 feeling really good about where we are.”

And he was right about a few things. Particularly in some high-profile 2022 Senate and gubernatorial races, a handful of partisan-aligned pollsters were bending the averages on sites like RealClearPolitics and adding to an atmosphere of unnecessary panic among Democrats. Take, for example, the race for governor in Arizona, where RCP had Republican election denier Kari Lake with a 3.5-point lead that was produced almost entirely by election-week polls from Republican firms Remington Research and Trafalgar. Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by under 1 point. That’s not actually a particularly huge miss, but it wasn’t an isolated case.

In 2022, Rosenberg also insisted that Democrats had a real chance to hold the House of Representatives, which at the time was considered close to laughable in national circles. Democrats did end up losing the House, but they got the enduring narrative win. And on election night, as his prophecies came true one after another, he got upgraded from “I don’t know this guy but I hope against hope that he’s right” to Nostradamus.

The problem for using the red wave that wasn’t as a template for 2024 is that Democrats outperformed narratives and expectations more than polls in 2022. There was very little in the available polling on election night 2022 that suggested Republicans were on the verge of a 2010-style midterm romp. In fact, the final generic ballot polling average on the much-maligned RealClearPolitics was that Republicans would win the national House vote by 2.5 points. They ended up winning it by 2.8.

Polling as an industry and an art has taken a bludgeoning since 2016. And it is true that some individual state polling was improbably off in 2016 and 2020, largely but not exclusively in the Midwest. But everyone seems to have forgotten that the national polls in 2016 were close to as good as they’ve ever been, with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 2.1 percent against a final RealClearPolitics average lead of 3.2 percent. Nationally, Trump beat expectations produced by forecaster certainty as much as he outperformed his actual polls. And in 2020, Trump ran ahead of his national polling average by a mere 3 points and once again came agonizingly close to victory in key battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Arizona.

But it is also the case that it might be Democrats who are now underperforming their expectations, if you believe the polling (which you should). With an incumbent president, very low unemployment and strong GDP growth, Biden ought to be on a glide path to reelection, especially with the incandescent fury about Dobbs powering Democrats elsewhere. But he’s not. And that brings us to the polls themselves, which the optimists are also telling you to ignore.

2) Polls aren’t predictive this far from the election.
The idea that polls are basically meaningless 10 months from a presidential election in which both candidates have close to 100 percent name recognition is one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that is as untraceable as a gun that has had its serial number scrubbed off. It was something that even Klein repeated in his interview with Rosenberg. On Wednesday, MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen called polling nine months from a presidential election “largely useless.” I genuinely have no idea why people keep saying this.

In 2020, Biden led Trump by 5.6 points on Feb. 16, and bested him in November by 4.5. In 2016, Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump by 3.4 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average, in a race she ultimately won nationally by 2.1 percent. On this day in 2012, Barack Obama led Republican Mitt Romney by 5.7 points and put him away in November by 3.9 percent. The most comforting comparison for Democrats might be 2004, when John Kerry was ahead of incumbent Republican President George W. Bush by 1.9 points in an average of the last 10 polls through Feb. 16, and Bush came back to win by 2.4 percent. But that’s still only about a 4-point swing overall.

The best you can say about this data, from a Biden Booster perspective, is that it always bounces around by a few points. But Biden, at the moment, likely needs more than a few points of recovery to win an Electoral College that still appears tilted against Democrats. And while there are plausible theories about why Biden’s polling might get better soon, and while it wouldn’t be especially surprising if it happened, there’s no particular reason to expect it to happen. On the contrary, all of the data that we have available to us suggests that the outcome of this November’s election will be within a few agonizing points of today’s averages: a 3-point Trump advantage in the Economist’s model, and a 1.1-point Trump lead in the RealClearPolitics average. These men are completely known quantities engaged in the first presidential rematch since 1956. Even someone who has been in a coma since late 2019 would have pretty firm opinions about them. But the Democratic optimists would have you believe that an electorally significant chunk of voters will soon change their minds.

3) Trump’s lead will vanish once people realize that Trump will actually be the Republican nominee.
Why might Trump’s lead be a chimera? According to one prominent theory, it’s because the inevitability of Trump’s nomination hasn’t broken through to voters who are unhappy with Joe Biden but who will ultimately come home. As the Editorial Board’s John Stoehr noted in a widely shared thread Tuesday on X, “Most people still don’t quite believe Trump is going to be the Republican Party’s nominee.” Once they do, he says, “a switch will turn on.” This theory supposes that the polling disadvantage will vanish like George Santos from the House floor or the critical race theory panic from the local school board meeting. I’ll admit to thinking some version of this might be at work; voters simply aren’t taking another Trump term seriously enough, and once they do, surely they will come to their senses and start telling pollsters that they will back Biden.

The trouble with this theory is that it should already be working its magic, and there is no evidence that it is. We’re halfway through February, not mired in some slow-news-cycle August afternoon the year before the election. The more time passes with Trump leading in polling averages, the less likely it is that there is anything particularly mysterious at work here at all.Even if you argue that there are warning signs in the outcomes for him, there can’t be much remaining doubt that he will claim the GOP nomination. And that means that all the special election overperformances, 2022 exuberance, multiple consecutive cycles of poor performance from the MAGA-fied GOP, and righteous post-Dobbs anger have to, at some point, add up to a polling lead for Joe Biden.

Unless and until that happens, arguing that Biden is a lock to win in spite of the evidence in front of you is to substitute disbelief for empirical reality. As Rosenberg put it incredulously, “The theory is that all this—the fact that Democrats just keep winning everywhere in red states and blue states, and ballot initiatives, and off-year elections, and special elections—isn’t going to translate over into 2024.” But that is exactly what the data is telling us! This denial is the same incredulity that led many to dismiss the possibility of Trump becoming the Republican nominee in 2016 despite his consistent polling leads throughout the cycle. The party decides, they said. No one so despised by their party establishment had ever captured a major party nomination—until one did. It is the same incredulity that led many voters to stay home or vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson in 2016.

It has now been almost nine years since the guy descended the escalator at Trump Tower, yapping incoherently about Mexican rapists and how we “should’ve taken” Iraq’s oil and free-associating about the hotels ISIS was building in Syria.* Nothing about him has changed since that day, or will ever change. And if Democrats are to hand him one last defeat and avoid the almost unfathomable catastrophe of a second Trump term, they are going to have to start acting like they understand just how close they are to disaster.