OPINION
With the US Presidential election an interminable seven months away yet, it appears as though the race is all but locked in. Not the result, certainly, but the campaign is already settled. All that’s left is the long months of arm-waving, speechifyin’ and trying to stop Joe Biden wandering off stage like a lost toddler.
Two things are (almost) inevitable: a second Trump-Biden showdown, and that Americans are unshakeably pessimistic about the economy.
On the first, it’s not implausible (indeed, some are banking it as a strategy-in-waiting) that Biden will, at the last moment, suffer some kind of ‘medical emergency’ and drop precipitously out. At which point a Democrat ‘saviour’ will be parachuted in at short notice, hoping to capitalise on a honeymoon period.
Who might it be? Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama lurk as distinct possibilities. That Hillary Clinton will set herself up for a second humiliation seems unlikely.
In the meantime, though, Trump has the Republican nomination stitched, and all outward indications are that Joe will shuffle on until November.
How will the match pan out? At the moment, the poll momentum is all Trump’s. Every dodgy court case only firms his chances.
Donald Trump is leading President Biden in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election, propelled by broad voter dissatisfaction with the national economy and deep doubts about Biden’s capabilities and job performance, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.
The poll of the election’s main battlegrounds shows Trump holding leads of between two and eight percentage points in six states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – on a test ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Trump holds similar leads when voters are asked to choose only between him and Biden.
The one outlier is Wisconsin, where Biden leads by three points on the multiple-candidate ballot, and where the two candidates are tied in a head-to-head matchup.
Of course there’s still seven months of quintessentially American hoopla to go, and hundreds of millions in campaign spending. But the die, it is obvious, has already been cast: it’s the economy, you stupid bastards. And the news isn’t good for Biden.
In every state in the survey, negative views of the president’s job performance outweigh positive views by 16 percentage points or more, with the gap topping 20 points in four states. By contrast, Trump earns an unfavourable job review for his time in the White House in only a single state – Arizona – where negative marks outweigh positive ones by one percentage point.
Both candidates carry a tarnished image into the race, but voters view Biden more unfavourably. Asked to choose which candidate has the better physical and mental fitness to handle the White House, 48 per cent pick Trump and 28 per cent say Biden. One result is that Biden is having a harder time holding together his 2020 coalition, with declining support among Black, Hispanic and young voters.
Perceptions in politics are everything. In this case, the perceptions are almost universally gloomy.
The latest poll finds that voters in the swing states are more focused on the economy than are voters nationwide. Some 35 per cent cite the economy and inflation as the issues most important to their vote, compared with 19 per cent in the Journal’s national survey in February. They are also a bit more pessimistic about it. Only 25 per cent say the economy has gotten better in the past two years, compared with 31 per cent in the national poll.
In fact, the economic pessimism is so entrenched that some otherwise unusual dynamics are in play. Voters describe the national economy as in far worse shape than their own state’s. They also view their personal finances as better off than the economic prospects of Americans more broadly.
Some 68 per cent in the survey said it was becoming harder for the average person to get ahead, compared with 26 per cent who said it was getting easier – a 42-point gap. But 46 per cent said their own finances were moving in the right direction, just three points lower than those who said their finances were going in the wrong direction.
[Tony Fabrizio], the Republican pollster, said a main finding of the poll was that battleground-state voters feel a pervasive sense of “economic malaise…like a wet blanket that sits over everything,” which has weighed down views of the president’s performance. Fabrizio, who worked for a pro-Trump super PAC at the time the survey was conducted, has since joined the Trump campaign.
There are unlikely to be any real surprises in this election. Voters already know both candidates well enough to have made up their minds. Perceptions are everything: Biden is well-meaning but incompetent; Trump is mean but competent.
Mark Erichsen, 67, a retired tax accountant in Farmington Hills, Mich, has ruled out backing Biden, saying the president has failed to stop illegal immigration and is misguided in pushing for electric vehicles, among other policies.
“Trump – he’s not somebody you’re going to point to and say, ‘That’s how you should live your life.’ But his policies made sense.’”
The Australian
As someone once told me: Trump is a bastard, but he’s the bastard we need right now.