How Bad Are Biden’s Polling Numbers Right Now? Are You Sitting Down?

Welcome to How Bad Is This, Really?, a recurring feature in which we take the temperature of how things are looking in the presidential election and what seems likely to happen in November. In September 2020, in the thick of COVID and Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, Slate asked a probing and timely question: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Get Knocked Out Cold With a Shovel for Exactly Six Weeks and Five Days?” That was the length of time left, at that moment, until Election Day. New York Times polling freak Nate Cohn published an article Monday about the Times’ latest swing-state surveys, and they found—paraphrasing here—that registered voters, particularly young and nonwhite ones, generally blame Joe Biden, personally, for everything bad that has ever happened or is happening, including inflation and the war in Gaza, and, in some cases, things that are demonstrably not his fault, such as five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade. Trump led Biden in head-to-head matchups in all five of the key states polled—and, worse yet, the poll did not find that Biden performed any better among likely voters rather than registered voters, or in a three-way race against both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That knocks out a major rationalization that Dems have had in circulation, namely that Biden is disproportionately unpopular with Americans who aren’t going to vote anyway or are going to end up voting for RFK Jr. rather than Trump. Which is to say that, if the question is “How bad is this, really?,” the answer is “Pretty bad!” Biden does have reasons to be hopeful, such as the enormous amount of money he is compiling to spend on Of course, polling is but a mere snapshot of a moment in time, one that wisps ever further away from us into the firmament of the past, as a poet writing about the New York Times’ Nate Cohn might say.