Starting Friday, we are exactly four months away from Election Day on November 3.
While that may be an eternity in campaign politics, right now the latest national state polls and key to the general election indicate that Democratic challenger Joe Biden leads President Trump.
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“In some states, it is close to and within the margin of error. But, let’s be honest, the President is behind today. All national polls suggest it is behind, ”said Republican strategist and Fox News contributor Karl Rove in ‘America’s Newsroom.’
The alleged Democratic candidate outperforms Trump by 8.8 percentage points on an average of the latest national polls compiled by Real Clear Politics. More importantly, Biden enjoys single-digit advantages over the president in most states where the race for the White House is likely to be won.
The President has repeatedly branded the polls as “false” and touted: “I am getting VERY GOOD internal Poll Numbers.”
And Trump’s reelection campaign argued in a memo Sunday that “the public voting methodology is cheaper and flawed.” They have repeatedly accused polls of underestimating Republican voters.
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But even some of the president’s biggest supporters have expressed concern about the numbers. Among them is Rove, the mastermind behind President George W. Bush’s two White House victories and one of the Republican Party’s most revered political strategists.
Rove, who informally reports the Trump campaign, pointed to the current deficit facing the president and explained that “these things happen in campaigns.” It pointed to May 1988, when then-Vice President George HW Bush followed Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in double digits. Bush finally straightened the ship and ended up defeating Dukakis in November.
But with the country grappling with the worst pandemic in a century, an economy crushed (at least temporarily) by the pandemic, and national protests over racial inequalities, this is anything but a normal political climate.
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“I think the coronavirus and racial issues are difficult for the president to handle,” Rove acknowledged when he called on the president to press the reset button.
“When you are in the barrel, when you get a lot of bad press and the polls are against you, you should do something that says, ‘We are moving in a different direction.’ That’s what I mean by a restart,” he said.
But Rove insisted that the president and his campaign have many tools to straighten the ship.
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“The question is not ‘Where are the polls today?’, But ‘What does the president need to do to regain the advantage?’ And remember, it has some powerful tools. He is the president and all of these polls show that on the issue that tends to be number one in a campaign, namely the economy, he still has an advantage, “said Rove.
On Friday, the Trump campaign came up with a new television commercial that praises the president and criticizes Biden for the economy.
Biden, for his part, acknowledges that the polls at the moment seem quite positive, but he is not reading too much in the polls.
“I don’t want to fool myself,” he told reporters at a press conference this week. “I know the polls are very good data. But I think it is too early. It is too early to pass judgment. I think we have a lot more work to do.”
While the polls are a snapshot of how people feel right now, and there is still a long way to go until Election Day, the clock is ticking.
“In late spring, early summer, polls are beginning to correlate quite strongly with what you see on Election Day,” says Daron Shaw, the Republican partner in the Fox News poll and a member of the decision team. from Fox News.
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However, Shaw added that “we can all think of election campaigns where that was less true.”
Shaw, a veteran pollster for numerous Republican presidential campaigns, noted that while summer is traditionally a difficult time for presidential candidates, as many Americans are disconnected, “it may be even more difficult to move the dial now,” such as the coronavirus outbreak. and racial protests continue to dominate the headlines.
