What To Think About Biden’s Latest Poor Poll Numbers

The New York Times’ release on May 13 of its latest presidential poll prompted another round of Democratic hand-wringing about President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects.

The polls, conducted with Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer, found that among registered voters, Biden trailed former President Donald Trump in five battleground states — Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — and led him in just one, Wisconsin.

More alarming still, Trump had a double-digit edge over Biden in two of those states, and is polling worse than Democratic Senate incumbents in four of those states — suggesting it’s the nominee himself, not his party, that’s the issue.

The truth is that while the current polling paints an incomplete picture, there are both genuine grounds for Democrats to be nervous about Biden’s trajectory, and bright spots to give them hope.

Much of the skepticism about Biden among core Democratic constituencies – Black, Latino, and young voters — is not reflexively partisan, as down-ballot polling suggests, meaning these voters could be amenable to persuasion. And the Biden campaign’s massive fundraising edge has given it confidence that it can get its message out to those voters more effectively than Trump can in the coming months.

“With these crosstabs, it can get tricky, but in general, Democrats should be worried,” said Avery James, a research analyst at the Republican polling firm Echelon Insights . “This is the best polling performance streak for a Republican presidential nominee we’ve seen since 2004, when Republicans won the popular vote.”

While other state-level polls have shown Biden trailing Trump by smaller margins, the polling average still has Biden behind in all six battleground