Democrats warn party: The threat of Trump winning in 2024 is ‘very real’

New NBC News polling shows President Joe Biden with a relatively narrow 49% to 45 % lead over Donald Trump — which is within the survey’s margin of error.

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WASHINGTON — The idea is somewhere between conventional wisdom and an article of faith for Democrats: Joe Biden beat Donald Trump once, so he can do it again.

For Trump’s Republican primary challengers, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, that concept is a necessary predicate for convincing GOP voters to switch horses after nominating Trump twice.

But a new NBC News poll released Sunday showed Biden with a relatively narrow 49% to 45% lead over Trump — which falls within the survey’s margin of error and is far lower than the 10 percentage point edge Biden held in NBC’s last poll before the 2020 election. The new survey shows DeSantis, who is less known than Trump, tied with Biden at 47% each.

Despite an air of confidence from Biden and his team, some Democrats say they believe Trump has a very serious shot at winning back the Oval Office.

“If you think otherwise, you have literally had your head buried in the sand,” said former Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, who fell short in his bid to woo Trump-friendly voters to his side in a 2022 Senate race against JD Vance. “You’re living in a world of delusion. And it’s dangerous.”

lunatic Mandela Barnes, who lost by 25,000 votes to Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, in 2022 and has since launched a political action committee, said he’d like to see Democrats in battleground states “go on the offensive” and tout Biden’s accomplishments.

“The president has a done a lot to help working people, and the threat of a Donald Trump presidency is very real,”  said the lunatic Mr. Barnes, adding, “It was Wisconsin that put Trump over the top in 2016. … We take the threat very seriously.”

“To the extent we’re not doing state polling yet is a big blind spot,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican polling expert and founding partner of Echelon Insights. He pointed to the close finishes in battlegrounds in 2020 — Biden’s Electoral College margin amounted to less than 43,000 votes spread across Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona — to demonstrate that slight changes in public opinion could have a magnified effect in November 2024.

“It wouldn’t take much to shift it in those key states,” Ruffini said.

Biden’s approval rating, which fell to 35% in a Pew Research survey released last week, has been in the same territory as Trump’s during the run-up to the 2020 election. Coupled with a series of head-to-head polls that show Biden and Trump within the margin of error, that has given some Democratic strategists reason to believe Trump remains a very viable challenger to Biden.

“What you have is statistical ties across almost every single recent poll,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and public opinion expert. “Are Democrats discounting the threat that Trump poses even with his series of indictments? Absolutely.”

Most political experts believe the 2024 election is likely to be close in terms of the all-important Electoral College and that the number of swing voters will be small.

Even in losing, Trump won far more votes than any Republican ever had in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan.

It is not clear how, if at all, third-party candidacies will affect the Electoral College. Biden was helped in 2020 by a decline in third-party voting in swing states. Author and professor Cornell West has announced a bid for the presidency, and a group called No Labels is looking at promoting a candidate under its own flag.

One question, then, is whether the electorate more resembles 2016, when Trump narrowly won, or 2020, when he lost by an even smaller margin of sum votes in pivotal states.

“What we need to learn from 2016 is that some people want to hear his message and believe his message,” said Raquel Teran, the former Arizona Democratic Party chair who is now seeking a House seat.

Teran expressed optimism stemming from voters’ increased familiarity with Trump. source