Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden greets audience members after speaking at the Amtrak Bear Maintenance Facility, November 6, 2023, in Bear, Delaware.
If you needed one more thing to be depressed about, you probably woke up to the latest New York Times/Siena poll over the weekend. It was hard to miss, leading the New York Times front page with a two-column headline: “Voters in 5 Battleground States Favor Trump Over Biden.”
And it got worse from there. According to the poll, young people and prospective voters of color were disproportionately deserting the president. And in an astonishing (and hard-to-believe) finding, voters under 30 said they trusted Trump on the economy more than they trusted Biden by a margin of 28 points.
The poll then became the day’s major story. The Times, in a companion piece, reported on Democrats’ anxiety. Former Obama campaign chief David Axelrod said almost in so many words that Biden should consider getting out of the race. Other media piled on.
Should this poll be taken seriously? The Siena Poll has a record of creating self-fulfilling prophecies and getting some things seriously wrong. In 2019, a Siena finding that Elizabeth Warren would not do well against Trump helped drive her out of the race. On the eve of the 2022 midterms, Siena showed Democrats losing Congress by four percentage points, a finding that generated headlines; the outcome a few days later was a virtual tie.
As Michael Podhorzer has demonstrated, pollsters influence outcomes by letting their own biases and intuitions tilt poll results by deciding who to include in the sample. A month before its late-October 2022 poll showing a four-point deficit, the Times/Siena showed Dems up by two points. In the October story, the Times/Siena showed Biden losing ground among independents and women. But as Podhorzer writes, “What the paper didn’t disclose was this: Independent voters hadn’t changed their minds; the New York Times changed its mind about which Independents would vote.”
Do all prospective young voters truly trust Trump on the economy more than Biden? Or just the Times/Siena sample?
The real function of the Times/Siena Poll is to scare the pants off Democrats with a rollout in the newspaper they intuitively trust. It inevitably leads to wild mood swings and often bad decisions, motivated by a poll with an imperfect record.
Notwithstanding these caveats, the latest Times/Siena poll seems directionally right. The accompanying story quotes a 53-year-old voter who supported Biden in 2020 and is now planning to vote for Trump, though with misgivings: “The world is falling apart under Biden.” That sentiment rings true for many voters, as does the Times/Siena finding that 71 percent think Biden is too old for the job.
The larger problem is a convergence of events that reinforce underlying doubts. The most important of these are two wars at risk of becoming prolonged quagmires. And in the case of Israel, rather than looking strong by standing by an ally, Biden looks weak because Netanyahu is openly defying Biden’s plea to reduce civilian casualties. Netanyahu’s war has become Biden’s war, and it is hard to see a good outcome anytime soon.
Even with all of this, the bottom line that Trump is leading Biden seems to defy common sense. What about all of those prosecutions? What of Trump’s recent threats that sound crazier and crazier? The problem is that the more that the spotlight is on Biden, the more it is off Trump, and Trump can coast along by being the non-Biden.
The comfort for Democrats is the Times/Siena finding that a Trump conviction, rather than an indictment, would chop six points off his lead across the board, enough to flip most of the battleground states in Biden’s favor. But a conviction between now and November 2024 is increasingly unlikely.
The finding that voters support a “generic Democrat” by eight points is less cause for comfort. As soon as that generic Democrat becomes an actual person, negatives appear. And even if Biden should heed Axelrod’s advice and quit the race in favor of a younger and more vigorous candidate, Biden’s baggage would not vanish. A successor candidate would be under pressure not to reverse Biden’s policies on Ukraine or Israel. Nor could a different candidate cause interest rates to drop.
Moral of the story—a split verdict: There is good reason not to take the Siena Poll too literally, and equally good reason to be worried about Biden and 2024.
