The polls are damning: Almost every one has Joe Biden up ahead of President Trump by a significant margin — not because Biden is the ideal candidate, but because Trump is not.
A new New York Times-Siena College poll released Wednesday shows Biden leading Trump by 14 points, 50% to 36%, among registered voters. Numbers such as these have created a fresh wave of confidence among Democrats, who lost to Trump once and refuse to be beaten again.
“We’re going to beat him in November, and I think we’re going to even beat him in Ohio,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. “And Ohio will mean an Electoral College landslide.”
But some Democrats are urging caution. This was, after all, the mistake the party made in 2016 — they bet it all on Hillary Clinton and put too much confidence in numbers that were too good to be true. Some aren’t willing to face that same disappointment again.
And they’re right — because Biden isn’t the shoo-in candidate Democrats would like him to be. On the issues of the day (namely, criminal justice reform and racial tensions), he’s had a poor record. And though his numbers among black voters have held strong throughout the primary, there are some in the African American community who are tired of playing along with the political games Biden helped create.
“We look at Joe Biden and see more of the same. It’s about the era he came up. It’s about his identity — he’s a rich, old white man. What are his credentials to us, other than Obama picking him?” Tonya Griffith, an African American woman from Detroit, said to Politico. “It’s nice that he worked with Obama. But let’s keep it real: That was a political calculation. Obama thought he needed a white man to get elected, just like Biden thinks he needs a Black woman to get elected. We can see through that.”
Griffith isn’t the only one who feels this way. Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, confirmed that many in her district have said they’re voting for Trump.
“Everyone will roll their eyes and say, ‘That’s Debbie.’ But I was right in 2016,” she told Politico.
But voters’ indifference toward Biden might be what saves him. Trump won in part because Clinton was so unpopular and divisive. Many voters saw him as the lesser of two evils and voted accordingly — or they didn’t vote at all. Now, Biden is the guy that could be better, but also much worse.
Still, if there’s one thing we learned from 2016, it is to remain wary of big numbers that don’t necessarily reflect public opinion. Democratic officials’ failure to contain the lawlessness of the protesters creating their own autonomous zones will not sit well with rural voters. And the GOP’s efforts to ramp up coronavirus relief might convince swing-state voters that the Trump economy is worth their bet.
Recent events could just as well work against Trump. But Biden isn’t giving voters much to work with from his Delaware basement. Democrats would be wise not to take victory for granted.
