The Past Week's Polls

As of mid-April, the conventional wisdom had been that Biden was closing the gap with Trump. But as of this past Sunday, things changed, first with CNN:

Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure.

Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%.

This, of course, is a six-point lead, although this is in a theoretical national popular vote match, which doesn't take place in the real world. However. this has turned out to be the low point for Trump in the week's resuilts. As of yesterday,

Despite being on trial in New York City, former President Donald Trump has widened his lead over President Joe Biden during the past month.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a three-way contest between Biden, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would choose Trump, 36% would vote for Biden and nine percent (9%) would vote for Kennedy. In April, Trump led by 6 points, 44% to 38% for Biden, with RFK Jr. at 10%.

The Washington Examiner provides some analysis:

While the [Rasmussen] analysis does not mention why Trump is surging, the results come during a week when he has used a New York City hush money trial against him to give daily press conferences outside the court that the media, especially left-leaning TV outlets such as CNN, cover. What’s more, he has been more focused on his second term agenda and telling MAGA what he wants to do should he return to the White House.

Biden, meanwhile, has been rocked by the economy, inflation, and the public’s anger over paying high prices. He has also been hurt politically by the raging campus protests in response to his Middle East policies.

The big point this take misses is that the campus pogroms are unique. A writer named Michael A Cohen (not the former Trump lawyer) points out on MSNBC,:

the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., even suggested that the war in Gaza “may be Biden’s Vietnam.”

. . . Not only is the war in Gaza not a primary issue of concern for voters; it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Indeed, according to the recent Harvard poll of voters aged 18-29, Israel/Palestine ranked 15th out of 16 on their list of the most important issues facing America. (Oddly the only issue that ranked lower was student debt.)

. . . As CNN’s polling guru Harry Enten recently pointed out, Biden’s declining support among young voters predates the war in Gaza — and the war has had practically no effect on 2024 presidential polling.

This suggests a basic tone-deafness in the Biden campaign. which seems to want to triangulate over Gaza and Israel in hope of keeping pro-Palestine voters on board, where this doesn't really make a difference. The MSNBC piece continues, "Perhaps Biden will pay a price with Arab voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan." But another poll from this past week makes that issue moot:

Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 15 points in Michigan six months before the presidential election, one poll has shown.

According to a Kaplan Strategies survey of 804 people, the former president is leading the incumbent by 51 percent to 36 percent in the key battleground state. The margin of error for the survey was 3.5 percentage points.

Most other polls show a closer race, although few of them show Biden ahead, and as of today, the Real Clear Politics average shows him ahead by 1.2 points.

It seems to me that comparisons among the 1968 urban and college riots, the 2020 George Floyd riots, and the 2024 college pogroms all miss an important point. There were diosorders over the Viet Nam war in 1968, both on campuses and in Chicago at the Democrat convention, but there were also urban riots following the King assassination in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City.

In other words, there was an important race and class component to the general unrest, and it was an early manifestation of the alliance between the urban underclass and the Ivy League upper crust -- keep in mind that many in the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society had at minimum prosperous backgrounds, but Thomas Ayers's father was the wealthy CEO of Commonwealth Edison.

The 2020 George Floyd riots mirrored this alliance, with upper middle class students declaring protest zones in cities like Seattle in alliance with African-American protesters, and Black Livea Matter lawn posters appeared in many prosperous suburban neighborhoods.

What's unique about the 2024 campus pro-Palestine riots is that urban African-American support has been minimal. Notably.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton compared anti-Israel protests to the events of Jan. 6 on Thursday and said Democrats were losing the “moral high ground” by not calling out the demonstrations on college campuses.

. . . “ How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses, you lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said.

This is turning out to be a boutique issue that isn't uniting the left. The big subtext in 1968 was the draft, which affected young men across the board, who didn't want to be conscripted for cannon fodder. As it happened, upper middle class college students were most aggrieved, as it offended their sense of entitlement, but working-class whites and African-Americans were just as much affected. Nixon quickly defused the problem by winding down the war and instituting the draft lottery.

But in 2024, there isn't the equivalent class alliance, and as the polling above suggests, Gaza and Palestine aren't issues on which many in the electorate are basing their decisions.

Instead, there are two big factors. One hasn't been acknowledged as much as it should be: the more Trump goes to court, the higher he rises in the polls. It's beginning to emerge that with rthe New York criminal trial, he isn't just holding his own against Biden with a lead of a few points, he's starting to widen the gap. As Jonathan Turley put it in a different context, Alvin Bragg is Trump's best lawyer.

The second issue is that the public has now grown plenty familiar -- indeed, overfamiliar -- with Joe Biden. The electorate is tired of the stumbles, the slurring, the malapropisms, the repeated embroidered stories of Uncle Bosey and such. The investigations of the Biden family grift haven't revealed bombshells, but the overwhelming impression on the public has been that he's shallow, venal, weak, vindictive, and lazy. I doon't see how he can turn this around. He is what he is, and that's all his handlers have to work with.