Keller @ Large: New Battleground State Polls Are Bad News For 2020 Democrats
BOSTON (CBS) - Imagine you're the Democratic Party, riding high off a midterm trouncing of GOP House candidates, eyeing a White House occupied by a one-man self-wrecking ball.
The primary task of any campaign – to turn out its base – is made easier by the relentless obnoxiousness and patent dishonesty of the incumbent, not to mention mounting warning signs of an economic slowdown. Between the furious and the anxious, you have an ample pool of voters who'd prefer to vote him out now rather than wait a year.
But in a deeply divided country, you still need a few more votes to get over. They are mostly moderates, relatively tolerant socially and open to criticism of corporate behavior, but relatively conservative fiscally, wary of tax hikes and dramatic changes to their health care.
So what do you do in the summer and fall leading into the primary season? Keep your intra-party arguments as low-key as possible. Avoid hard-left ideology. And keep the focus, every day in every way, on the incumbent and the reasons why a large majority of voters can't stand him.
Right?
Not if you're the 2019 Democratic Party.
No, party chairman Tom Perez wanted to create "a process that gives every single person the chance to articulate her or his vision for the American people." He found the huge Democratic field to be "really great people in their own right" and wanted to "make sure the American people get to see what I've had the privilege of experiencing."
Four-and-a-half months later, the resulting pander fest – which has supplied the Trump campaign with a treasure trove of video of candidates endorsing politically problematic positions on immigration, gun control and health care reform – has yielded the results of the new battleground state polls from the New York Times and Siena College, which "suggest that the president's advantage in the Electoral College relative to the nation as a whole remains intact or has even grown since 2016, raising the possibility that the Republicans could — for the third time in the past six elections — win the presidency while losing the popular vote…."
"The poll offers little evidence that any Democrat, including Mr. Biden, has made substantial progress toward winning back the white working-class voters who defected to the president in 2016, at least so far. All the leading Democratic candidates trail in the precincts or counties that voted for Barack Obama and then flipped to Mr. Trump."
Perhaps the televised impeachment hearings will enhance swing voter scrutiny of and distaste for Trump.
Maybe, miraculously, the apparent deadlock among the top Democratic candidates will break loose, enabling an early anointment that will free the future nominee to start talking to those voters in a way that doesn't repel them.
But if these poll numbers are truly the swing state reality after three years of presidential policy bungling and compulsive self-incrimination, what should be a bright future for the Democrats instead looks unnecessarily bleak.