Sean Trende: Are We Too Bearish On Trump?

Sean Trende, the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, is the keeper of the conventional wisdom on Trump's outlook for the election. The odd thing is that the Democrats, other than Biden himself, are the ones who've signed on to it. For instance, Clinton pollster Mark Penn takes the conventional line just this morning at RCP:

Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the Harvard-CAPS/Harris polls by about 5 points and in the FoxNews polls by 3 points as of May 24. It is closer in the Real Clear Politics average that shows a gap of only 1.1%, but swing state polls across the media show Trump routs in almost all of them.

What bothers me is that none of this has changed in six months. Public perceptions of the New York hush money trial have been, if anything, favorable toward Trump. Rallies and campaign events like those in New Jersey and the Bronx have been surprisingly well-attended. In contrast, Biden's public performance has been consistently embarrassing, and there are increasing calls for him to step aside. But the RealClearPolitics averages haven't moved in many months. I'm inclined to attribute this to Rush Limbaugh's theorem that the pollsters' aim is to demoralize Republicans and keep up Democrat hopes that Biden can still turn things around.

Now even Sean Trende is at least teasing a reassessment. At RCP yesterday, he ran a piece, Are We Too Bearish on Trump?

I think if you asked most analysts to publicly assess the presidential race, they would say it is some form of a tossup. Maybe some would give Trump a 52% chance of winning or some would give Biden a 51% chance, but most would be in the range of a 50-50 outcome.

I’m in that bucket as well, but I’m starting to rethink the wisdom of my position. In particular, I’m wondering if there isn’t some combination of “safety in numbers” and “unthinkability bias” at work. To state the first possibility more plainly, if everyone has this as a roughly 50-50 race, no one is out on a limb, and, well, they can’t fire all of us if we’re all wrong together!

More accurately, they can't fire the whole group for groupthink, but the whole group can be laid off if the company goes out of business. Trende goes through possible reasons to think the race isn't a tossup. For instance, referring to polling over Brexit, which was thought to be a tossup, but which passed 52%-48%,

. . . everyone agreed the polling suggested a tossup but thought things would eventually work out for the Remain side (mostly because they couldn’t fathom Britain voting to leave the EU). But that’s not how tossups work. If people really thought it was a tossup, about half should have been willing to predict Britain would leave. Likewise, if everyone is agreeing with a negative assessment of the playing field but then calling the race a tossup, is it really a tossup?

RealClearPolitics's own betting average this morning shows the odds of a Trump win are 51.5 vs Biden 36.3. This isn't a tossup. Trende goes on to note that Biden's State of the Union didn't change things, and neither has the New York hush money trial. He concludes,

Maybe the third opportunity, the debates, will really change things (my take: they might). But the real point is that things have to change for Biden to win. I don’t think anyone disputes that at this point. We have a word for races like that, and it isn’t “tossup.”

But then, astonishingly, but maybe predictably for RealClearPolitics, he announces, "Next week: The case for the race remaining a tossup." But this avoids the need to ask real questions like, "Why is Trump effectively ahead when the poll averages keep making it look like a tossup?" But this implicitly questions the poll averages, which are Sean Trende's livelihood, so he's going to treat the question of whether it's a tossup as a tossup itself.

This piece by Eric Levitz at Vox is much more insightful. He takes up the question of why blacks, Latins, and young people are leaving the Democrats:

2024 will witness a historically rapid shift in the demographics of the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Which is odd, considering that the two parties are running the same candidates as they did four years ago.

. . . I’ve been toying with a different theory of the president’s woes, one that makes better sense of his peculiar demographic weaknesses: Voters with low levels of trust in society and the political system are shifting rightward.

. . . Donald Trump redefined the GOP in the eyes of many, associating the party with a paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system.

Levitz goes on to argue that issues like the COVID lockdowns and madatory vaccinations increased institutional distrust across the board, and the 2024 election is largely about institutional distrust -- and some part of that distrust is the claim that the 2020 election was "stolen".

[T]he possibility that part of Biden’s problem lies with low-trust voters is worth taking seriously — not least because, if true, it would imply that the president is actually in worse shape than polls suggest.

Distrustful voters participate in surveys, but they do so at much lower rates than high-trust voters do. Which makes sense: If you believe that you can’t be too careful with other people, you probably aren’t going to take a lengthy phone call from a stranger.

And of course, the amount of distrust in legacy media is steadily increasing, while polls and poll aggregates are the creatures of legacy media -- but even this leaves aside the entirely prudent reluctance of many people to disclose their political preference to a stranger who claims to be a pollster. Right, when the FBI inflitrates Catholic parishes looking for right-wing terrorists. Levitz concludes,

The president is reportedly averse to considering this possibility. To the contrary, according to Axios, Biden is convinced that the polls are underestimating his support. This is certainly conceivable, but there is little basis for assuming as much. And given the evidence that social and political trust might be influencing voters’ behavior, it would be reckless for Biden to run as though he’s ahead. More concretely, if the president is trailing badly — as a consequence of tepid support among distrustful voters who want change — he might be well-advised to embrace a much different messaging strategy than his current one.

Back when I worked in IT, the truism was nobody got fired for choosing IBM -- but that was in the 1980s. IBM is now just a niche supplier. Sean Trende reminds me of the IBMers of a past generation.