Trump Conviction Deals Fatal Blow to Biden, Makes Blue States Look Like Swing States as New Data Arrives
For those of you who were stuck in a CNN-sodden airport terminal last Thursday, or if you were visiting the pink-haired aunt who always keeps MSNBC on in the background, you no doubt heard anchors and pundits practically giddy with excitement over what former President Donald Trump’s kangaroo-court conviction would mean for the 2024 polls.
Depending on the source the talking heads on the left side of the dial consulted, Trump’s conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan either mattered a great deal or not at all. They tended to ignore polls that fell into the latter category.
Instead, if you listened to or read left-bubble sources over the past week or so, you tended to see a Reuters poll reported in H1 font, considering it found that one in 10 Republicans would be less likely to vote for Trump after the guilty verdict. Meanwhile, mostly elided over NPR’s conclusion: “Trump verdict would likely move only a small number of votes, poll finds.”
Either way, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the polling is in the leading. And, on that count, both Reuters and NPR are wrong, according to new polls from Fox News: Not only is Trump not losing ground after the verdict, he’s putting non-traditional states into play for the Republicans.
In Virginia, which hasn’t been a swing state in the presidential election since the George W. Bush years, Trump and Biden are in a dead heat. Biden won that state by over 10 points in 2020.
Meanwhile, in Nevada — which is on the outer limits of being a swing state, but which went for Biden by 2 points in 2020 and typically favors Democrats in national races — Trump is up by 5 points, with voters overwhelmingly saying the former president is better equipped to handle the border crisis.
Both polls were conducted June 1-4, meaning voters had already absorbed the news of Trump’s conviction — as well as weeks of wall-to-wall coverage about the so-called “porn star hush money” case.
Both had a margin of error of 3 percent and both used a combination of landline, cell phone and online responses; 1,107 registered Virginia voters and 1,069 registered Nevada voters were surveyed.
In both states, the disappointing results for Biden represent wider problems for his campaign as a whole.
Take Virginia, where Biden and Trump are tied at 48 percent. While there are plenty of demographic explanations for why a reliably blue state would be in play going into the summer months, two numbers stick out like a pair of sore thumbs.
First, young voters — a reliable source of turnout for the Democrats during the Trump years — aren’t in their corner this time around.
Fox News noted that, in the poll, there was “no age gap, as voters under 30 (48% each) and those 65 and over (48% each) split their support.”
Then there was the black vote, which needs to stay monolithically Democrat if Biden is to eke out wins in the same swing states he carried in 2020. In the Fox poll, he still leads, although with nothing like the margins he had four years ago; 48 percent of black voters said they were planning to vote for Biden, with 25 percent saying they were for Trump.
In 2020, that split was 81 percent Biden, 9 percent Trump. Considering that a plummeting black Democrat vote is one of the key demographic stories in the polling for the 2024 election thus far, this is yet another bad augury for the president.
In Nevada, Trump is also over-performing with minority groups, although not to the extent that he is in Virginia. However, three issues dog Biden there.
First, union household voters — another Democrat bloc, generally — only favor Biden by 1 point. He won that group by 15 percent four years ago. Second, on border security and the economy, Trump holds huge edges on who voters trust to do a better job — 59 to 37 percent on the border, 56 to 40 percent on the economy.
Finally, there’s the matter of Biden’s approval rating; he’s currently 16 points underwater in the Silver State, a dreadful position for any incumbent to find himself in this late in the game.
But, perhaps most importantly, the matter of the trial didn’t seem to have any substantive effect on voters’ impressions of Trump.
In Nevada, the results are roughly in line with what the RealClearPolitics polling average has been showing all along; that aggregate has the former president up by 5.3 points over the current president as of Friday morning.
While Virginia is more of a stretch for Trump, considering the state’s recent electoral history, this is still in line with a Roanoke College poll conducted between May 12-21, which found the two candidates tied at 42 percent. One before the Trump verdict, one afterwards, same result. Nothing changed.
Trump needs to win more than Nevada and Virginia to take the presidency, mind you, but the fact that these two states are still in play just days after the president was convicted is another nail hammered into what increasingly looks like a coffin for Biden’s electoral chances.
Even if he manages to carry both — and he should carry at least one — this means the Democrats will have to spend obscene amounts of resources propping up the president in both states. That’s not only to ensure Biden wins there, mind you, but because of critical down-ballot races.
Nevada is host to one of the most competitive Senate races this cycle. Virginia, meanwhile, is one of the states where the GOP “red wave” never materialized in 2022 — meaning there are plenty of vulnerable Democrats in swing districts that could get knocked off if the base doesn’t turn out.
Whatever resources get spent there are resources that can’t be spent where Biden needs them: namely Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Remember, he still has to win some of those, too. He can’t just take home the should-be slam dunks that are Nevada and Virginia. And, no matter what the flapping heads at CNN and MSNBC want to believe, he definitely can’t rely on the Trump verdict to carry him to victory.
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