The warning signs for Biden in new 2024 polls – and a reason for him to hope

President Biden is seeing some of his best national polls since the 2024 campaign kicked into gear, with the most recent ones showing something close to a tied race.

Of course, a tied national race probably isn’t good enough for Biden, given the electoral college. And Monday brought a reality check on the difficult path to reelection he still faces.
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The New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll — a rare high-quality look at multiple key states — shows that the issues that have long dogged Biden continue to loom large with less than six months to Election Day. Biden simply isn’t winning the voters he should.

And while there are signs he could turn it around, there’s little margin for error.

To recap:

Former president Donald Trump leads in five of six key swing states.
He leads by at least seven points in four of the six, in head-to-head matchups among registered voters.
If you look just at likely voters, the picture is significantly better for Biden in Michigan, but he still trails by at least six percentage points in three of six states.

If Trump wins those three states and the rest of the map breaks down as it did in 2020, he’s on the doorstep of the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. If he wins the four states he leads by at least seven points among registered voters, he in all likelihood wins.

A few numbers within the poll stand out.
Young, Black and Hispanic voters. Biden’s struggles with young, Black and Hispanic voters show no sign of abating.

Biden underperforms Democrats

Voters want what he promises, just not him. To that same point, the poll offered an interesting hypothetical matchup. It asked voters to choose between “a candidate who promises to bring politics in Washington back to normal” (an analog for Biden) and “a candidate who promises to fundamentally change America” (an analog for Trump).

Abortion isn’t Biden’s silver bullet. Democrats have hoped abortion rights would continue to aid them, as they have in every election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. But it doesn’t appear to be a game changer for Biden yet.

Gaza looms. Despite theories about how much the war in Gaza could hurt Biden, we haven’t had much good data. But this poll provides some, and it suggests that the issue could matter in a close race.

The potential hope for Biden. If there’s good news for Biden, it’s that the path to victory is still quite evident: Bring these voters home. And he’s actually not that far away.

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