Three Comforting Lies Democrats Need to Stop Telling Themselves About November

President Joe Biden is in trouble in this November’s election. This does not mean he is guaranteed to lose, but defeat by a vengeful, unhinged Donald Trump and his radicalized Republican Party is a much more realistic possibility than many Democrats seem willing to accept. And if they are to rise out of the torpor of this dreadful situation, Democrats have to first stop telling each other comforting lies about what’s actually happening out there.

I understand why it is so hard to believe—Trump is an absurd, repellent human being who not only is promising to install a soft dictatorship in the United States as his first order of business but continues to accept zero accountability for the attempted putsch his team of Keystone Coupsters ran after the 2020 presidential election. He is threatening a military invasion of blue states and cities, egging on Texas neo-confederates on the verge of a shooting war with federal troops over the border, promising to lay off virtually the entire federal workforce and replace them with Turning Point USA interns, and facing 91 felony counts in four separate cases. He was recently found liable by a jury for sexual assault and then ordered to pay his victim more than $83 million. When speaking, he usually makes about as much sense as a refrigerator-magnet set assembled into sentences by a 2-year-old.

But the fact that so many find the possibility of a Trump restoration to be utterly inexplicable, or even farcical, does not mean that it could not happen. And right now, there are too many high-profile voices in Democratic circles spinning yarns about how happy days will be here again soon and that Biden is in a fantastic position, actually. They are well-meaning (to use a phrase that got bandied about a lot last week by newly minted memory and aging specialist Robert Hur), but a lot of Democrats are telling each other these three comforting lies that aren’t ultimately going to help anyone.

Late last month, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein hosted veteran Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg to make the case for why Democrats should not be flipping out about the polls. Rosenberg’s very vocal and public position that 2022 wasn’t going to be a red-wave election has earned him near-mythical status in certain Democratic circles of the kind that was once enjoyed by former FiveThirtyEight data guru Nate Silver. “Democrats keep overperforming in elections,” Rosenberg said. He noted that Democrats did much better than expected in the midterms, as well as in the small number of significant races in 2023. He added that “when we actually go vote, we just keep winning, and they keep losing. And so I go into 2024 feeling really good about where we are.”

And he was right about a few things. Particularly in some high-profile 2022 Senate and gubernatorial races, a handful of partisan-aligned pollsters were bending the averages on sites like RealClearPolitics and adding to an atmosphere of unnecessary panic among Democrats. Take, for example, the race for governor in Arizona, where RCP had Republican election denier Kari Lake with a 3.5-point lead that was produced almost entirely by election-week polls from Republican firms Remington Research and Trafalgar. Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by under 1 point. That’s not actually a particularly huge miss, but it wasn’t an isolated case.

In 2022, Rosenberg also insisted that Democrats had a real chance to hold the House of Representatives, which at the time was considered close to laughable in national circles. Democrats did end up losing the House, but they got the enduring narrative win. And on election night, as his prophecies came true one after another, he got upgraded from “I don’t know this guy but I hope against hope that he’s right” to Nostradamus.

The problem for using the red wave that wasn’t as a template for 2024 is that Democrats outperformed narratives and expectations more than polls in 2022. There was very little in the available polling on election night 2022 that suggested Republicans were on the verge of a 2010-style midterm romp. In fact, the final generic ballot polling average on the much-maligned RealClearPolitics was that Republicans would win the national House vote by 2.5 points. They ended up winning it by 2.8.

Polling as an industry and an art has taken a bludgeoning since 2016. And it is true that some individual state polling was improbably off in 2016 and 2020, largely but not exclusively in the Midwest. But everyone seems to have forgotten that the national polls in 2016 were close to as good as they’ve ever been, with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 2.1 percent against a final RealClearPolitics average lead of 3.2 percent. Nationally, Trump beat expectations produced by forecaster certainty as much as he outperformed his actual polls. And in 2020, Trump ran ahead of his national polling average by a mere 3 points and once again came agonizingly close to victory in key battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Arizona.

What is true is that the Dobbs backlash seems to have set the Republican electoral ceiling somewhat lower for the time being. In both 2022 and 2023 they lost races that should have been winnable for the opposition party with an unpopular president and an improving but still uneven economy. Republicans have also been getting dusted in special elections everywhere since Dobbs, including on Tuesday in the race to fill the expelled Republican George Santos’ House seat. But this underperformance appears to be already baked into head-to-head presidential polling, and the Republican electorate’s insistence on once again forwarding Donald Trump as their nominee is exacerbating the effect. That’s clear from the fairly substantial body of survey research that currently shows Trump edging out the president narrowly but Nikki Haley beating Biden decisively.

But it is also the case that it might be Democrats who are now underperforming their expectations, if you believe the polling (which you should). With an incumbent president, very low unemployment and strong GDP growth, Biden ought to be on a glide path to reelection, especially with the incandescent fury about Dobbs powering Democrats elsewhere. But he’s not. And that brings us to the polls themselves, which the optimists are also telling you to ignore.

The idea that polls are basically meaningless 10 months from a presidential election in which both candidates have close to 100 percent name recognition is one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that is as untraceable as a gun that has had its serial number scrubbed off. It was something that even Klein repeated in his interview with Rosenberg. On Wednesday, MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen called polling nine months from a presidential election “largely useless.” I genuinely have no idea why people keep saying this.

In 2020, Biden led Trump by 5.6 points on Feb. 16, and bested him in November by 4.5. In 2016, Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump by 3.4 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average, in a race she ultimately won nationally by 2.1 percent. On this day in 2012, Barack Obama led Republican Mitt Romney by 5.7 points and put him away in November by 3.9 percent. The most comforting comparison for Democrats might be 2004, when John Kerry was ahead of incumbent Republican President George W. Bush by 1.9 points in an average of the last 10 polls through Feb. 16, and Bush came back to win by 2.4 percent. But that’s still only about a 4-point swing overall.

The best you can say about this data, from a Biden Booster perspective, is that it always bounces around by a few points. But Biden, at the moment, likely needs more than a few points of recovery to win an Electoral College that still appears tilted against Democrats. And while there are plausible theories about why Biden’s polling might get better soon, and while it wouldn’t be especially surprising if it happened, there’s no particular reason to expect it to happen. On the contrary, all of the data that we have available to us suggests that the outcome of this November’s election will be within a few agonizing points of today’s averages: a 3-point Trump advantage in the Economist’s model, and a 1.1-point Trump lead in the RealClearPolitics average. The odds of this matchup being anything other than Biden–Trump, for better or worse, are pretty long at this point. These men are completely known quantities engaged in the first presidential rematch since 1956. Even someone who has been in a coma since late 2019 would have pretty firm opinions about them. But the Democratic optimists would have you believe that an electorally significant chunk of voters will soon change their minds.

Why might Trump’s lead be a chimera? According to one prominent theory, it’s because the inevitability of Trump’s nomination hasn’t broken through to voters who are unhappy with Joe Biden but who will ultimately come home. As the Editorial Board’s John Stoehr noted in a widely shared thread Tuesday on X, “Most people still don’t quite believe Trump is going to be the Republican Party’s nominee.” Once they do, he says, “a switch will turn on.” This theory supposes that the polling disadvantage will vanish like George Santos from the House floor or the critical race theory panic from the local school board meeting. I’ll admit to thinking some version of this might be at work; voters simply aren’t taking another Trump term seriously enough, and once they do, surely they will come to their senses and start telling pollsters that they will back Biden.

The trouble with this theory is that it should already be working its magic, and there is no evidence that it is. We’re halfway through February, not mired in some slow-news-cycle August afternoon the year before the election. The more time passes with Trump leading in polling averages, the less likely it is that there is anything particularly mysterious at work here at all. Trump is utterly dominating the Republican nominating contests thus far and is leading his only remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, by more than 30 points in her home state of South Carolina. His campaign, his voluminous legal troubles, and his own personal, ceaseless antics have been fixtures in the news for months. Even if you argue that there are warning signs in the outcomes for him, there can’t be much remaining doubt that he will claim the GOP nomination. And that means that all the special election overperformances, 2022 exuberance, multiple consecutive cycles of poor performance from the MAGA-fied GOP, and righteous post-Dobbs anger have to, at some point, add up to a polling lead for Joe Biden.

Unless and until that happens, arguing that Biden is a lock to win in spite of the evidence in front of you is to substitute disbelief for empirical reality. As Rosenberg put it incredulously, “The theory is that all this—the fact that Democrats just keep winning everywhere in red states and blue states, and ballot initiatives, and off-year elections, and special elections—isn’t going to translate over into 2024.” But that is exactly what the data is telling us! This denial is the same incredulity that led many to dismiss the possibility of Trump becoming the Republican nominee in 2016 despite his consistent polling leads throughout the cycle. The party decides, they said. No one so despised by their party establishment had ever captured a major party nomination—until one did. It is the same incredulity that led many voters to stay home or vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson in 2016.

It has now been almost nine years since the guy descended the escalator at Trump Tower, yapping incoherently about Mexican rapists and how we “should’ve taken” Iraq’s oil and free-associating about the hotels ISIS was building in Syria.* Nothing about him has changed since that day, or will ever change. And if Democrats are to hand him one last defeat and avoid the almost unfathomable catastrophe of a second Trump term, they are going to have to start acting like they understand just how close they are to disaster.