Why Biden and Trump struggle to make gains when the other stumbles
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN
(CNN) — Even after former President Donald Trump’s conviction last week on 34 felony counts, he and President Joe Biden remain stuck in a strikingly similar strategic position: Neither man can win without attracting a significant sliver of voters who dislike them but may be even more alienated from their opponent.
While the guilty verdict in Trump’s hush money trial seems likely to further weaken his already tenuous standing with voters, by itself it’s unlikely to strengthen Biden’s own precarious position with the public. That means the election will likely pivot on whether more voters in the key states place greater weight on their doubts about Trump or on their concerns about Biden.
“Given the unpopularity of both of these candidates, I think either candidate can win with a negative rating substantially higher than their positive rating,” said longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
Polling shows that Biden and Trump alike are winning support from an unusually large number of voters who express reservations about them — largely because they consider the alternative even more unpalatable.
Biden in polls, for instance, is winning a much greater share of voters who disapprove of his performance as president than any other incumbent seeking reelection in recent times. During their reelection bids, Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2020 each won only 3% of voters who said they disapproved of their job performance, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. George W. Bush won only 6% of his disapprovers in his 2004 reelection, the exit polls found.
But as for Biden, the latest Marist/NPR/PBS NewsHour poll released last week is typical: It found that 15% of voters who disapprove of his performance say they will vote for him anyway. That extends the pattern from the 2022 midterm election, when an unusually high 12% of voters who disapproved of Biden voted for Democratic House candidates, and even higher percentages of Biden disapprovers voted for Democrats in such key statewide races as the Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin gubernatorial contests, according to the exit polls.
Voters who say they “strongly” disapprove of Biden voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in 2022, and in the latest Marist survey, Trump drew over 9 in 10 of them. That’s standard: Voters who strongly disapprove of a president’s performance always vote overwhelmingly against him or his party.
But House Democrats way overperformed in 2022 among the voters who said they “somewhat” disapproved of Biden. (They won 49% of them, far more than the roughly one-third House Republicans captured in 2018 from voters who somewhat disapproved of Trump.) And in the new Marist survey, Biden, stunningly, draws 55% of the vote against Trump from voters who somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. (The latest national Marquette Law School poll, released in late May, also showed Biden drawing 53% of voters who somewhat disapproved of his performance.) By contrast, in their reelection campaigns, Trump and Obama both won fewer than 1 in 10 of the voters who somewhat disapproved of their performance, while Bush won fewer than 1 in 5 of them, the exit polls found.
When people ask whether anything hurts Trump, Biden’s showing among voters who somewhat disapprove of his performance points toward the answer. All the controversies swirling around Trump do hurt him, in a way that can be tangibly measured. In the new Marist poll, Biden’s share of the vote against Trump in a two-way matchup is 10 points higher than Biden’s own approval rating among men who identify as independents, 14 points higher among college-educated White women, 15 points higher among members of Generation Z and millennials, and 21 points higher among independent women. That’s extraordinary for an incumbent president whose approval rating, for better or worse, is usually the north star of his reelection campaign.
Those results represent millions of voters who are down on Biden’s performance, frustrated by inflation and, in many instances, worried he’s too old for the job, but who are planning to vote for him anyway because they consider Trump unfit or dangerous. Biden’s problem is that while there is a large pool of voters willing to make that calculation, it is not an infinite one.
Conflicted voters would be much more likely to push Biden over the top if he had a stronger foundation of Americans genuinely pleased with his record. Late last year, many Democrats hoped that steady improvement in inflation, interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve Board and a quick end to the fighting in Gaza might raise Biden’s approval rating. But none of those events has occurred. “There’s no evidence that events are lifting [Biden], and there’s no evidence that the campaign is lifting him,” said Bill Kristol, a longtime conservative strategist who has become a prominent Trump critic.
The share of voters who view Biden’s performance positively remains stuck at an ominously low level. Biden’s approval rating is usually reaching only about 40% in most polls. That puts him just slightly higher than the Gallup approval ratings for Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush in the final months before their respective reelection defeats in 1980 and 1992 and slightly lower than Trump’s in the final quarterly Gallup average before his defeat in 2020. The presidents reelected since World War II all had significantly higher Gallup approval ratings than Biden late in their first terms.
So long as so few voters view Biden’s performance positively, he will remain vulnerable to Trump, no matter how many doubts voters hold about the former president, many strategists in both parties agree.
In fact, polls show Trump also benefiting from the lesser-of-two-evils dynamic boosting Biden. Presidential candidates typically win only minimal support from voters who view them unfavorably: Trump in 2020 and GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, for instance, won just 5% of voters who expressed unfavorable opinions about them, the exit polls found. But last month’s Marquette survey found that in the rematch with Biden, Trump is winning 17% of the voters who view him unfavorably; he was winning 12% in the Marist poll. That range puts Trump more in line with the unusually large share he won among voters who viewed him unfavorably during his successful 2016 race against Hillary Clinton.
In results averaged over the two most recent national Marquette polls, a solid majority of voters agreed that Trump has behaved corruptly. But about one-third of those who described Trump as corrupt said they intend to vote for him anyway, according to unpublished results provided by poll director Charles Franklin. One reason for that: More than 90% of the voters who are voting for Trump even though they believe he has behaved corruptly also disapprove of Biden’s performance as president.
Each man’s vulnerabilities, in other words, is blunting the impact of the other’s. Ayres predicts the electoral consequence of Trump’s conviction “is going to be minimized” because “most Americans don’t think Joe Biden is able to serve effectively in a second term” and are angry at him over the cost of living. But those acute Biden vulnerabilities, Ayres continued, are not dooming his campaign “because he’s running against a convicted felon” who has alienated large swathes of the electorate on other grounds as well.
Republican pollster Greg Strimple believes voters have already decided whose deficiencies concern them most: Biden. Recently, Strimple and a Democratic partner polled the seven most competitive swing states for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. The poll showed Trump leading in each state except Wisconsin, where the two men were tied. As important, Strimple said, was a series of questions in which the pollsters asked voters whether they were more concerned about a potential vulnerability of Trump’s or Biden’s. Each time, Strimple noted, a greater number said the potential Biden liability worried them most — with more, for instance, saying they worried about Biden’s age and capacity than about Trump’s temperament and legal problems.
“The most fascinating thing about the survey was even if people believe something bad about Trump, they were still voting for him,” Strimple said. “That is a strength of Trump’s, but it’s really the weakness of Biden that is propelling Trump.”
Strimple expressed more confidence about a Trump victory than any Republican outside his campaign whom I have spoken with this year. That’s not because he thinks voters have especially opened to Trump since 2020, but because he believes they have closed the book on Biden, just as they did in the final months of the presidencies of Carter in 1980 and H.W. Bush in 1992. Biden “can’t change inflation and he can’t change the fact that he is really old,” Strimple said. “If I am sitting there in the war room of campaign Biden, I am like, ‘How can I fix two things that are unfixable?’”
Longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg sees the race in almost exactly the opposite terms. Rosenberg, who was the most prominent Democrat predicting that the widely anticipated red wave would fizzle in 2022, believes the vulnerabilities of Trump and his MAGA movement are so insurmountable that they eventually will overwhelm voters’ doubts about Biden.
Rosenberg leans heavily on the precedent of 2022. Though Republicans rolled to big victories in red-leaning states, he noted, Democrats vastly exceeded expectations by winning the gubernatorial races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Those victories, he said, have created a template for Democrats to exploit the resistance to Trump’s agenda in enough swing states to reach 270 Electoral College votes this year.
“We know what happens when we go in with lots of money and a big campaign and talk about MAGA to swing-state voters: We win and they lose,” he said. “If MAGA in 2024 is even more extreme and more dangerous … that is just the more likely scenario of what happens then the alternative.”
Rosenberg would prefer if more voters held positive views about Biden, but he insists it’s not necessary for the president to win because the “constant dynamic” in our politics since 2018 has become opposition to Trump and MAGA. “Who the Democratic candidate is is to some degree immaterial,” Rosenberg said. “Because this has been a pattern that has repeated again and again and again” in the statewide races across the battlegrounds “regardless of who the Democratic candidate has been.”
Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, views the campaign, in effect, as a competition between these perspectives. He wrote last week that the level and nature of turnout will likely be shaped by whether the public debate in the race’s final weeks focuses more on Biden’s problems or Trump’s.
“Since 2016, whenever an election has been ‘about’ MAGA, turnout rates have been much higher than normal, and Democrats have won much more often in those contests,” Podhorzer wrote. “If the Trump and MAGA agenda is salient in October, I am confident turnout will again be at historic highs and that Biden will do as well or better than he did in 2020. But if the economy, immigration, or a similar issue is center stage, turnout levels will be lower, as will Biden’s prospects for an Electoral College victory.”
Podhorzer views Trump’s conviction as necessary but not sufficient to shift the focus among swing voters from their discontents with the president back toward their hesitations about Trump. “The effect of the conviction shouldn’t be exaggerated in a time where, by itself, no one thing can change the race,” Podhorzer wrote in an email. “But it is very much characteristic of the kind of events that remind voters of how dangerous a second Trump term would be.”
On balance, history suggests there is more reason for concern among Democrats than Republicans in this pattern of offsetting weakness. In 1980, Carter successfully raised many doubts about his challenger, Ronald Reagan, just as H.W. Bush did about his challenger, Bill Clinton, in 1992. Yet neither Carter nor Bush could escape the gravitational pull of their own very low approval ratings and were soundly defeated. Voters who really dislike the status quo will almost always find ways to rationalize voting for change — no matter how risky that change appears. When people are deeply dissatisfied with conditions in the country, as I wrote during that 1992 campaign, stability seems to them the real risk.
Still, Trump is a different kind of challenger from Reagan or Clinton. Because neither had held federal office, it was easier for both men to function as a relatively blank screen on which voters projected their hopes. By contrast, because Trump has been president already, voters have more fully formed opinions of what it would mean to return him to the Oval Office.
So far in the 2024 race, that dynamic has largely advantaged Trump. His retrospective job approval in most surveys has been improving — often to a higher level than at any point during his presidency. That’s largely because voters’ discontent over inflation (and to a lesser extent border security) under Biden is causing them to weigh Trump’s record on those issues more heavily when judging his overall record.
A major danger to Trump from the conviction in New York, as Podhorzer suggests, may be that it begins a process of reminding voters about everything else they didn’t like during Trump’s presidency — the chaos, division and unpredictability. Whatever the immediate effect of the verdict on the race, the prospect of electing a convicted felon as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and commander in chief may weigh more heavily on Americans as the election approaches. At a time when Trump is relying to an unusual degree on irregular voters who don’t tend to follow current events, news of his conviction may come as a surprise and “remind them of what he is really like,” said Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of Data for Progress, a liberal polling firm that last week published a major survey of swing voters.
“I think there are going to be a lot of voters out there who voted in 2020 and don’t like either candidate and stay home,” she added. “Or they might say, ‘I’d rather vote for the guy who is not a convicted felon.’”
Voters’ reservations about Trump and Biden help explain why the presidential race has seemed so static for months. The doubts each man faces place a ceiling on his support that limits his gains when the other stumbles — a pattern that seems more likely to be confirmed than confounded by Trump’s unprecedented conviction.
Against a stronger Democrat, Ayres believes, last week’s guilty verdict would likely be fatal; but against a stronger Republican, he noted, so would the concerns about Biden’s performance and age. The winner in this rematch between two weakened combatants will likely be the candidate who can focus more voters on his rival’s vulnerabilities than his own.
The-CNN-Wire
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