“I think Donald Trump is going to win this election,” Bennet continued, “probably in a landslide victory and take control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
The Biden campaign has been optimistic about its position, at least in public. In an interview on Monday, Biden referenced the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, noting that he’s trailed in the polls before. In 2020, the Biden campaign famously ignored his supporters’ fears and insisted that everything would work out in the end. And it did, thanks to relatively narrow wins in a handful of battleground states.
But Bennett correctly points out that the situation is much more serious now than it was then. The Biden campaign’s presentation is based on the idea that as Election Day approaches and the possibility of Donald Trump returning to the White House becomes more real, voters will lean back to Biden. But given the current state of the polls, that lean would have to be very large.
The last time Democrats have performed this poorly in the national polls at this point in the race has been since 2000, when George W. Bush had a big lead over Al Gore. In every other comparable period, from 2004 to 2016, Democrats had leads of between 1 and 6 percentage points. In 2020, Biden led Trump by nearly 10 points. Now, Biden trails by 2 points.
At the state level, the picture isn’t much better — 538’s average is derived in part from national polls, due to the relative paucity of state polls — but across battleground states, even including Minnesota, which Biden won handily in 2020, the race is tied or (in many cases) Biden is ahead.
At this point in 2020, Biden was leading by an average of seven points in these states. He now trails by about three points, on average.
It’s also worth noting that in nearly every state, the polling averages tipped in Trump’s favor as the race progressed, with the final results in each state being even more favorable for the former president.
In national polls and across those seven states, the polling margin at this point in 2020 has worsened by an average of 10 points for Biden.
That would normally be the kind of position that would spark a dramatic shift in a campaign. For the Biden team, it certainly could, including the unusual possibility that Biden ultimately won’t be the party’s nominee. But there has been no apparent change since last month’s debate, which saw Trump rise in national polls and the apparent catalyst for doubts about whether Biden would appear on the ballot in November.
“I don’t think the White House has done anything since that disastrous debate to actually indicate that they have a plan to win this election,” Bennett said Tuesday, “that they have a credible plan to win the battleground states that we need to win in order to win this election, and they need to execute on that.”
The Biden campaign’s official line has been to act as if the polls are questionable or reflect a temporary fluctuation, and that concerns about Trump will ultimately outweigh concerns about Biden. Perhaps they will. An unusual election may lead to unusual things.
But it’s not hard to understand why Bennett and many others in his party are concerned.
