The big November bust-up

WITH the US presidential election only six months away, President Joe Biden seems to be in dire electoral straits.

A new set of polling results released last Monday (May 13) by Siena College and The New York Times showed he’s losing to Republican candidate Donald Trump in five of six battleground states.

The White House incumbent trails Trump in Nevada by 12 points (38 per cent to 50 per cent), in Georgia by 10 (39 per cent to 49 per cent), and in Michigan and Arizona by 7 (42 per cent to 49 per cent). Trump is also now ahead by three points (47 per cent to 44 per cent) in Pennsylvania and Biden leads by two in Wisconsin (47 per cent to 45 per cent), suggesting that it’s a toss-up in these two states.

According to RealClearPolitics averages, Trump leads Biden in three states: by 6.2 points in Nevada, 5.2 in Arizona, and 4.6 in Georgia, while indicating that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan are up for grabs.

The results are very similar if independent third-party candidates, including Robert F Kennedy, are included in the polling.

Trump has only to win Nevada, Georgia and Michigan where his lead is outside the margin, and the states he had won in 2020, to get him 283 electoral college votes and a presidential win.

Of course, a lot could happen before Election Day on Nov 5 that could change the two candidates’ standing in the polls. And Biden could still take down Trump among undecided voters who do not like either candidate.

President Biden and the Democrats are hoping to win the support of the undecided by emphasising that Trump is a threat to abortion rights and democracy.

But most polls indicate that the two issues are not helping Biden – that undecided voters believe that both candidates are threatening democracy, and that abortion rights will not determine the choices of a majority of voters. Rather, the health of the economy remains on the top of voters’ agendas.

Most troubling to Biden is the finding that he is losing support among young, black and Hispanic voters who helped deliver him the race in 2020, and who have traditionally voted for Democratic candidates. In fact, according to the Siena College and the NYT poll, Biden and Trump are tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanics while Trump wins 20 per cent of black voters, the highest level of black support for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years.

Trump’s legal troubles

And as Politico put it, “what once resembled a wall of legal obstacles that stood between Donald Trump and his return to the White House is now looking like little more than a series of speed bumps”.

It’s true that the four criminal cases that Trump is facing have diverted him from the campaign, although he has been using the courthouse as another stop on the trail.

Overall the prosecutions, including the ongoing trial in a Manhattan court, are unlikely to deliver a devastating political blow to Trump’s presidential prospects.

The legal action in New York is nevertheless historic, with Trump being the first former president ever to stand trial for alleged criminal wrongdoing.

Trump denies wrongdoing in the case, being heard in New York, which centres around hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential bid, in order to stop her from going public about what she claimed was an affair with him, which he denies.

According to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump allegedly engaged in a scheme with his then-lawyer Michael Cohen and others to influence the 2016 election by suppressing negative information about himself. Trump is accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

The case is one of the four indictments that Trump faces and is the first to go to trial, putting his legal problems directly before jurors and the public.

Most polls suggest that the trials will not affect his standing among members of his political base; on some level they help him portray himself as a political martyr being persecuted by a vindictive government.

Indeed, Trump has been repeating his claims that his legal struggles are the result of political persecution by prosecutors including Bragg, a Democrat.

Likening his legal travails to the struggles of famed South African leader Nelson Mandela against apartheid, Trump even shared a supporter’s comparison of his legal troubles to how Jesus Christ was martyred by the Romans.

But the trial in New York could create some political consequences for Trump. The NYT/Siena College survey found that 54 per cent of registered voters said they believed Trump had committed “serious federal crimes”, though only 26 per cent said they were paying a lot of attention to the former president’s legal struggles.

And while 46 per cent of registered voters in the poll said Trump should be convicted in the New York case, he still held a one-point lead over Biden overall in the survey – 46 per cent to 45 per cent.

But then the polls have also indicated that a conviction could become an electoral game-changer for the former president.

A January NBC News national poll of registered voters found that Trump led Biden 47 per cent to 42 per cent – but that Biden would have a 45 per cent to 43 per cent edge if Trump were to be found guilty and convicted of a felony this year.

And a recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that 60 per cent of registered voters said they would not vote for Trump if he were to be convicted of a felony by a jury.

Trump himself will need to be in court for the entire trial, which will be held every weekday except on Wednesdays. “We’ll just have to figure it out,” he said in February. “I’ll be here during the day, and I’ll be campaigning during the night.”

But the trial will also dominate the national news media’s coverage, showing Biden attending to nationwide matters while Trump looks small, responding to the charges of a porn star.

The Democrats hope that the details of the alleged affair will stick in voters’ minds. But the former reality TV star’s image seems resistant to such allegations, which certainly don’t seem to affect his standing as far as the Republican electoral base is concerned.

Recall that Trump was elected as president in 2016 shortly after the release of a 2005 tape from behind the scenes of TV entertainment news programme Access Hollywood, in which he boasted about grabbing and kissing women without consent.