There’s no good news to be found for Joe Biden. Polls continue to show him either struggling against Donald Trump or outright losing. ABC News’ latest effort was no different, with the race as tight as it can be.
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The poll has Trump up 46 to 44 percent among all adults (excluding those who said they won’t vote) while Biden takes a one-point lead with registered voters. In a five-way race, which is the actual reality of the candidate slate, Trump and Biden are deadlocked at 42 percent among registered voters.
It’s not the topline numbers that are most interesting, though. Those are going to move around as the campaign unfolds, but the issue polling exposes Biden’s biggest liability.
Trump, moreover, leads in trust to handle six of 10 issues tested in the survey, with Biden ahead in just two. That includes, for Trump, the three most-cited issues in importance — the economy, on which he has a 14-point advantage; inflation, again 14 points; and crime and safety, 8 points. He tops out with a 17-point lead in trust to handle immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and leads by 8 points in trust to handle the war between Israel and Hamas and 7 points on “America’s standing in the world.”
Biden can’t escape one big factor: His presidency has been a painful failure for Americans.
When voters are asked about personality traits, the current president comes out ahead. In response to that, I’d note that Biden’s personality is manufactured nonsense and that he’s actually a vindictive, angry, and dishonest person, but I also realize that perception is reality. One of Trump’s downsides is that he leans into his personality flaws, making them much more visible and top-of-mind for voters.
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Does that matter, though? Right now, it doesn’t seem to because very few people care about personal traits when they can’t afford a mortgage and their savings have dwindled to nothing due to massive price increases. As the ABC News poll notes, Trump wins on the top three issues voters say they care about the most. That’s a problem for Biden if the election remains about his policy failures.
With that said, Republicans have to make sure the race stays in that lane. If too much focus is put on Trump’s legal cases, January 6th, or some other non-policy question, the election could quickly shift to a referendum on the former president instead of the current one. Message discipline is going to be everything, and that’s not exactly a strong suit of anyone involved.
In short, this latest survey shows that Biden has a soft underbelly that can be used to take him down. Republicans have to decide to strike it, though. We’ll see if they’ve got the attention span.