Republican Strategists Worried about Trump's Chances

[lpetrich]

‘Why are you not burying him?’: Trump allies fret over rising Biden threat - POLITICO

With only five months until the November general election, several Trump advisers, campaign veterans and prominent Republicans see the Trump campaign’s efforts to define and damage former vice president Joe Biden falling short.

These Trump supporters worry the campaign’s myriad lines of attack on Biden this spring — from his age to his work with China as vice president to the Obama economic record — are failing to dent the presumptive Democratic nominee. Recent polling shows Trump trailing Biden in key swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, with the Republican control of the Senate increasingly up for grabs due to a depressed economy and nationwide angst about the coronavirus pandemic.

But the Trump campaign has not had the success that the Obama campaign had in 2012, its success in making Mitt Romney seem like some heartless plutocrat who does not care about ordinary people.

Interviews with 10 people from Trumpworld — leading outside allies and donors along with inside aides and advisers — indicated a widespread agreement that the Memorial Day weekend is a critical turning point for the campaign. Now, every state has started reopening its economy in some fashion after being shut down by Covid-19, and the advisers want the campaign to ramp up as well, now that they think Trump is out of the worst of the political fallout from the pandemic. Otherwise, they fear the election will remain a simple referendum on Trump — his record over the past 3½ years, or his handling of the coronavirus pandemic — while Biden hides out in his basement, as Trump officials and advisers like to say.

Nice to see them running scared.

They continue to hope that they can win the sort of victory that they had over Hillary Clinton, a come-from-behind victory. But was it really a come-from-behind victory? I checked on polls from back in 2016, and the two candidates were neck-and-neck since July, with Clinton sometimes ahead and Trump sometimes ahead, but always within polling uncertainty. Trump's victory was a small one, consistent with the polls.

But at this time, Biden is well ahead of Trump, outside of polling uncertainty. The election is a little over 5 months away, so I checked on previous elections.

I checked on  Historical polling for United States presidential elections and it collects poll results for as far back as 1936. For the most part, poll results were approximately constant, and they usually predicted the election results rather well. There were some exceptions, like the Truman-Dewey race, where Dewey led in the last few months, only for Truman to have an election comeback. Carter was well ahead of Ford at first, but then Ford almost caught up.