Back in February, when pollsters for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal did some head-to-head polling for this year’s Presidential election, they found Joe Biden, who was then struggling in the Democratic primary, leading Donald Trump by eight points nationally, fifty-two per cent to forty-four per cent. On Sunday, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the Biden-Harris ticket leading the Trump-Pence ticket by exactly the same margin (fifty-one per cent to forty-three per cent). Other head-to-head surveys have exhibited a similar pattern. According to the Real Clear Politics poll average, on January 1st of this year, Biden was leading Trump by 49.0 per cent to 43.3 per cent, a gap of 5.7 points. On Tuesday morning, the poll average showed Biden ahead of Trump by 49.5 per cent to 43.0 per cent, a gap of 6.5 points. In eight and a half months, the race has shifted by less than a percentage point.
Of course, some people dismiss the polls entirely. (After what happened in 2016, you can hardly blame them.) But, if you take polling data seriously, the thing that stands out about the 2020 election thus far is its stability in the face of a whole series of tumultuous happenings—from Trump’s impeachment trial; to the coronavirus pandemic; to the death of George Floyd and the massive wave of protests it generated; to the recent revelations about Trump insulting America’s war dead and admitting that he knew the dangers of the coronavirus back in February. Now we are headed for another tumultuous happening: a bitter partisan battle over the Republican effort to rush through a conservative replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday. Should we expect this to have a bigger impact on the election than all the other consequential things that have happened this year?
On Monday, I called Peter D. Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster, and he told me that we shouldn’t have any such expectation. Together with a Republican pollster, Hart’s eponymous research firm carries out the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The fight over the Supreme Court could yet shift the dynamics of the election, Hart said, “but, right now, I don’t have any evidence to say it’s going to happen. Nothing that has occurred in the first nine months of this year has caused any major fluctuations in voter preferences.” And it’s not just this lack of movement that makes this election different from many others, Hart went on. The number of people who say they are still undecided is much lower than normal. In a typical election year, Hart said, that figure would likely be somewhere in the double digits by September. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, it’s now at six per cent. So there are far fewer voters left to be won over.
When I asked Hart how he explained all this, he spelled out the name “Donald Trump.” After a chuckle, he went on, “The polarization of attitudes towards Donald Trump has been greater than we have ever seen in our Presidential polling. This is the only President in the history of Presidential polling who has not had one month, one week, one day when the majority of the American public has given him a positive job-approval rating.” Last December, the NBC/Journal poll showed Trump with a job-approval rating of forty-four per cent and a job-disapproval rating of fifty-four per cent. The new poll shows Trump with a forty-five-per-cent job-approval rating and a fifty-three-per-cent disapproval rating. In statistical terms, these findings are practically the same.
With the American public’s attitude toward Trump seemingly set in stone, it’s hard for any individual development—even one that could create a solid conservative majority on the Court for many years—to shift the race very much. The counter-argument, which some Republicans are making, is that the fight over Ginsburg’s replacement will unite the G.O.P. and increase turnout among Republican voters. Speaking to the Associated Press over the weekend, Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, said, “This can be an important galvanizing force for President Trump.”
Hart didn’t entirely discount such a possibility. He said that the rancor surrounding a Supreme Court nomination could have some effect on turnout. But, if that happens, it seems likely to boost the Democratic voting tally as well as the Republican one. With the balance of the Court having shifted sharply to the right since Trump took office, its future composition is now an issue of huge consequence for both Democrats and Republicans. In a survey from the Pew Research Center that was released in August, sixty-one per cent of Trump supporters said the issue of Supreme Court appointments was “very important” to their vote. But the proportion of Biden supporters who said the same thing was even higher: sixty-six per cent.
So it seems perfectly possible that the Supreme Court fight could end up galvanizing more Democrats than Republicans. Following the death of Ginsburg, ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising Web site, took in more than seventy million dollars on Saturday alone. According to the Times, some White House officials are already concerned about alienating suburban women by nominating someone who is seen as strictly anti-abortion. Meanwhile, Biden is busy emphasizing that the appointment of another conservative to the Court could lead to its striking down the Affordable Care Act, insuring the demise of the law’s subsidized insurance policies and protections for preëxisting conditions. “In the middle of the worst global health crisis in living memory, Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court, trying to strip health care coverage away from tens of millions of families,” Biden said, in Philadelphia, on Sunday.
In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats made defending the A.C.A. a central plank of their campaign, and the tactic worked. Trump and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, are inviting Biden and the Democrats to use the same strategy again. It could also help to win over independent voters. According to a Politico/Morning Consult survey that was carried out over the weekend, forty-nine per cent of independents think that the winner of the election should pick Ginsburg’s replacement, compared with thirty-one per cent who think Trump should make the pick now.
Given the over-all stability of the political environment, which rests on the fact that most voters made up their minds about this President a long time ago, the untimely death of Ginsburg seems unlikely to prove decisive. But what a delicious outcome it would be if Trump’s effort to exploit it ended up coming back to bite him.
