Democratic supporters of President Biden should quit freaking out. Despite what a handful of recent polls suggest, there’s good reason to believe that the White House’s policies and performance will be judged a success by the voting public, and that Biden will be elected to another four years.
Pundits and pollsters have been warning for months that Biden’s anemic approval rating, mired around 39 percent, means Democrats are in imminent danger of losing the White House.
“He’s losing now and there’s no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it,” writes author/statistician Nate Silver.
“Biden is not up by 12 points. He can’t coast to victory here. He is losing. He is behind in most polls,” says New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “He is behind, despite everything people already know about Donald Trump. He needs to make up ground. If he does not make up ground, Trump wins.”
Silver and Klein both believe that Biden’s age makes his reelection hopeless and that he should quit the race. Other analysis pieces cite polls suggesting Biden is losing ground with Black, Latino, and Asian voters. Vox’s Christian Paz recently looked at numbers suggesting Biden is struggling to attract traditionally Democratic-leaning young voters.
At most, the numbers point to geographic regions and constituencies that need some attention from Democratic strategists. But it’s hardly a reason to panic. The “behind in most polls” rhetoric in particular is overblown and mostly wrong. According to RealClearPolitics, there have been 16 national polls conducted since January 22. Collectively, the surveys show Donald Trump leading Biden by a whopping … 1.1 percent. I’m not sure why Klein would assume Biden should be up by 12 points or some other randomly selected margin in our famously polarized country, but to conclude “he is losing” nine months before Election Day is wildly premature.
One polling number Democrats seem to keep ignoring is the unchanging favorability rating of Trump, the all-but-certain Republican nominee. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s favorability averaged 41 percent. Four years and an insurrection later, that number is 42 percent. The ex-president has a following whose loyalty remains famously unshakable despite riot, scandal, criminal indictments, and brazen promises to govern as a dictator. But Trump does not seem to have added to this base of loyal followers.
For a sober reality check, I contacted Allan Lichtman, a political scientist who has correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential contest since 1984, using indicators that he claims can explain every election since Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860. Lichtman’s book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House dismisses most polls as irrelevant to the final outcome of presidential elections.
“The problem with these horserace polls is they’re not predictors, they are only snapshots. And they are often wrong,” Lichtman told me recently. “The early polls had Jimmy Carter trouncing Ronald Reagan in 1980; Reagan went on to win in a landslide. George H.W. Bush trailed Mike Dukakis as late as June of 1988 by 18 points; he went on to win handily for a 25-point swing. The last Gallup poll in 2012 had Mitt Romney beating Barack Obama, who also went on to win handily.”
And don’t even get me started on the problems with polling in 2016, which famously failed to capture the surges in key states that carried Trump into the White House.
Instead of focusing on polls, Lichtman has developed 13 smart yes/no questions built around the central idea that an incumbent president and his party will normally prevail unless they fail in key measurable areas including foreign policy, domestic policy, party unity, and economic growth. If six or more of the 13 measurements go against the incumbent, according to Lichtman’s theory, the president (or his party) gets kicked out.
“There’s all this grousing about Joe Biden, his terrible approval ratings, he’s too old, he’s not exciting. But the Democrats’ only chance to win, realistically, is with Biden running, because you win the incumbency key,” says Lichtman, along with a second political indicator, party unity (so far, there is no serious Democratic challenger to Biden). Two of Lichtman’s economic-performance indicators — the absence of a recession and growth rates higher than the last two administrations — both look good for Biden. So does Lichtman’s indicator for a major successful domestic-policy change, which is the administration’s infrastructure law and CHIPS Act.
There’s been no serious social unrest under Biden (another key), and no major administration scandal (Hunter Biden’s laptop comes nowhere close to Watergate or the Clinton impeachment). So it looks like seven of Lichtman’s keys are lining up nicely for Biden.
There’s plenty that can go wrong for the administration. “What happens if the Republicans shut down the government? Who knows what effect that could have on the economy?” cautions Lichtman. The turbulence in Ukraine and the Middle East could lead to a foreign-policy debacle, and the emergence of a serious third-party challenger could tilt the playing field against Biden. But those what-ifs point to tangible matters of governance, unlike the latest polls that have rattled nervous Dems.
“Presidential elections are essentially votes up or down on the party holding the White House. I’ve been screaming this for 40 years, and the politicians paid no attention. It’s governing, not campaigning, that counts,” Lichtman told me. “Forget the sound bites, the negative ads, the attack, the tricks. Campaign on substance.”
