Things Aren't Fitting The Narrative Here

Fox reported Peter Doocy's question to Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday:

"Why do you think Americans are so down on President Biden?" Doocy asked. "I know you don't like to talk about polls like the five of six swing states that he is losing right now to somebody who is a criminal defendant, but more broadly, it doesn't seem like anything you guys are doing is making [Biden] more popular. Why do you think that is?"

Doocy is putting this in the context of the latest New York Times/Siena poll, but Byron York made the situation plainer in the Washington Examiner:

On Nov. 5, 2023, the New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” Focusing on the states most likely to decide the 2024 election, the New York Times reported, “The results show Mr. Biden is losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.”

. . . Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”

York goes on to quote, of all people, Sean Trende. I've singled both of them out as purveyors of mainstream conventional wisdom -- here's what Trende had to say:

As RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote recently, “The political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.”

In other words, nothing has changed, and we've reached the point where nothing's gonna change. If York (MA, Chicago) and Trende (BA, Yale) agree, this is almost certainly wrong. As I said yesterday, I think at least part of the problem is that the press across the spectrum is basically lazy (we're getting ready for Memorial Day, after all), and all they want to cover is the battleground states and the national popular vote matchup, which is meaningless.

But let's look at another factor, part of the New York trial that almost nobody has noticed:

On Tuesday, Trump was flanked by former 2024 primary rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and a pair of Florida GOP congressmen, Byron Donalds and Cory Mills.

Other boldface political names to swing by Manhattan Criminal Court include Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) as well as Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.

“It is about paying homage to Trump and positioning themselves for something should he win in November,” one person close to the Republican National Committee said Tuesday.

Wait a moment. The big focus of recent testimony at the trial from both Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen has been the Access Hollywood tape, the one where Trump joked to Billy Bush about grabbing ladies by their body parts. When that came out in 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's campaign[.] But in 2024, the Republicasn House Speaker wants to sit in the trial audience supporting Trump as the prosecution adduces that same tape as part of its case against Trump? Something has changed. and it's got to be big indeed.

The second is the polling in more reliably blue states, which media across the spectrum is covering only sporadically. Yesterday I mentioned Washington State and Minnesota, where a McLaughlin poll last week showed Trump and Biden essentially tied. Now a new poll from Interactive Polls shows Biden ahead of Trump there by only two points, within the margin of error.

Byron York does make another important point in his Washington Examiner piece:

Last month, CNN reported that from March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, through April 21, “Biden’s campaign and other Democratic advertisers spent $27.2 million on advertising for the presidential race, while the Trump campaign and GOP advertisers spent about $9.3 million, according to AdImpact data. The Biden campaign’s ad spending has included millions in key battleground states such as Michigan ($4.1 million), Pennsylvania ($3.9 million), Arizona ($2.5 million), Wisconsin ($2.2 million), and Georgia ($2.2 million).

. . . And yet, Trump leads Biden in the states that will determine who wins the presidency.

This again suggests that the commentators are focusing (1) on polling, which has proven historically inaccurate, and (2) polling almost exclusively from half a dozen states, when important things seem to be happening elsewhere. I think the chief mistake of the commentators in this cycle will be to underestimate the size of Trump's victory in November.