It is tempting to suggest that the best of all worlds is for Trump to be tied down in the courtroom, where he can’t let fly with one of his frequent provocations, while Joe Biden gets out and campaigns more, reminding Americans that he is a doddering fool.
The big story last week was that Biden is the comeback kid! The polls have closed, with some putting Biden back in the lead! It was that boffo State of the Union speech what did it, along with Trump’s ongoing legal troubles and the Arizona Supreme Court opinion supposedly establishing the Handmaid’s Tale as the law of the desert land.
But today Bloomberg reports its latest poll, showing Trump going back into a statistically significant lead (49 – 43 nationally), especially in the crucial swing states:
President Joe Biden’s recent polling bump in key battleground states has mostly evaporated as a deep current of pessimism about the trajectory of the US economy hurts his standing with voters.
The April Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Biden is ahead in just one of the seven states most likely to determine the outcome of his matchup with Donald Trump, leading Michigan by 2 percentage points. Biden trails the presumptive GOP nominee slightly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and his deficit in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina is larger.
Here’s the chart for the poll:
Bloomberg says “It’s the economy, stupid”:
The reversion comes as poll respondents offered a bleak near-term view of the economy, the issue that has consistently registered as their top concern at the ballot box. A majority of swing-state voters see worsening economic conditions in the coming months, with fewer than one in five saying they expect inflation and borrowing costs to be lower by the end of the year. Despite a resilient job market, only 23% of respondents said the employment rate would improve over the same time period.
My pal John Barnes notes:
Note that most of those companies are in the sectors where professionals are supposed to be heavily Democratic today (especially in the major media). Who are going to believe, those rosy job and growth statistics the Biden Administration reports every month, or your lying eyes watching your colleagues (or perhaps yourself) packing up their offices?
Then there’s this oddity, from CNBC:
Something strange has been happening with jobless claims numbers lately
Calling the state of the U.S. jobs market these days stable seems like an understatement considering the latest data coming out of the Labor Department.
That’s because most of the past several weeks have shown that first-time claims for unemployment benefits haven’t fluctuated at all — as in zero.
For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown.
The consistency has raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street. The only week that varied was March 30, with 222,000.
“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X.
I’m really beginning to think a Trump landslide is possible—even likely—if he campaigns sensibly. He might even win bigger if he’s behind bars and can’t campaign at all.
Chaser—You hate to see it, but David Brooks is suddenly pessimistic about Biden:
Why I’m Getting More Pessimistic About Biden’s Chances This Fall
I still believe Biden is the party’s strongest candidate, but I’m getting more pessimistic about his chances of winning.
The first reason is not political rocket science: Voters prefer the Republicans on key issues like inflation and immigration. Most Donald Trump supporters I know aren’t swept up in his cult of personality; they vote for him because they are conservative types who like G.O.P. policies and think Trump is a more effective executive than Biden.
The second reason I’ve become more pessimistic is because of what’s happening to the youth vote. NBC News released an interesting poll last weekend finding that interest in this election is lower than in any other presidential election in nearly 20 years. Only 64 percent of Americans said they have a high degree of interest in the election, compared to, say, 77 percent who had high interest in 2020.
But what really leaps out is the numbers for voters ages 18 to 34. Only 36 percent of those voters said they are highly interested.
P.S. Meanwhile, Biden loses the battle with the teleprompter once again: