Opinion by Kristen Soltis Anderson on July 16, 2024.

WHY REPUBLICANS ARE JUBILANT AND DEMOCRATS ARE DESPONDENT.

As Republicans head into the second day of their convention in Milwaukee, they are energized. They feel jubilant about their chances of winning in November and furious about the near-assassination of former President Donald Trump — an event many of them view as the natural consequence of what they see as hyperbolic rhetoric about the threat Mr. Trump poses to the country.

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Democrats Have Serious Concerns About Biden

Meanwhile, many Democrats are despondent. Serious concerns about President Biden’s electoral hopes loomed even before the events of the weekend transpired. Mr. Biden’s advanced age and attendant campaign trail challenges remain. And now the iconic images of a bloodied Mr. Trump, fist in the air, seem to have raised Democrats’ concerns that they have no good options, only a slow march toward defeat.

I admit it feels a bit uncomfortable to dwell on the Biden-Trump horse race given the gravity of current events, but there’s still an election coming up, no matter what, with early voting set to begin in some states in September. And a flurry of polls released in the last few days — while not capturing the impact of the tragedy in Pennsylvania on voter opinion — offer valuable insight into the rigidity of the presidential contest.

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In the initial aftermath of Mr. Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate, I was adamant that this was not simply “one bad night” and that there would be serious damage done to his standing with voters on questions of mental acuity and ability to serve. At the same time, with so many of Mr. Biden’s voters fiercely opposed to Mr. Trump returning to power, I suggested that we might actually not see polls move too much. Mr. Biden “may also be inoculated from a sudden polling decline of more than a few points because of the way our current deep polarization has frozen our politics,” I wrote in the week after the debate.

Polls Show Trump Only Slightly Ahead

Much of the polling since then seems to have borne out that thesis. The results have been poor for Mr. Biden but are not catastrophic: Fox News’s and NBC News’s polling each show Mr. Trump ahead by only three points nationally. CBS News’s weekend polling release showed Mr. Trump ahead across all key swing states, but by only a two-point margin in six of the seven states. Times/Siena polling released Monday paints a similar picture; being down by three points in the swing state of Pennsylvania does not mean the race is out of reach for Mr. Biden.

I don’t want to sugarcoat things for anxious supporters of Mr. Biden, though. At the moment, the numbers are bad for your candidate. The likelihood of a Trump victory is considerable. Voters believe that Mr. Trump’s policies made them better off, they trust him more on key issues like the economy, and though a significant number of Mr. Trump’s voters view him unfavorably, Mr. Biden’s advantage on favorability has effectively evaporated. Only 28 percent of voters think Mr. Biden has the mental and cognitive ability to serve as president, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. Mr. Biden’s diminished ability to persuade people he is up to the job may grow only worse as Election Day approaches.

But I think the doomsday thinking of Democrats today is eerily similar to the resignation felt by many Republican elites in the wake of Mr. Trump’s nomination in 2016. “The top of the ticket is toast, so save whomever you can down-ballot and let’s regroup after November” was a sentiment I heard somewhat frequently back then. Of course, we know how that turned out.

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For better or worse, Mr. Biden seems to be taking a page out of Mr. Trump’s playbook, ignoring the detractors, criticizing the media, trying to gut it out, bad news cycle after bad news cycle through sheer determination not to lose.

There are a million ways Mr. Trump can throw away the advantage he currently holds. He can lean into grievance and focus on the legal matters that still face him. His choice of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate may come with risks that have not yet shown up in polling. He can give in to his worst instincts and remind voters why they rejected him in 2020.

The best thing going for Mr. Biden is that he’s not Donald Trump. Even in the face of the historic events of the last few weeks, that fact remains. And that’s why, despite everything, I don’t think anyone should feel certain that the presidential election is all but a foregone conclusion.

Odds and Ends

■ Voters frequently say they would be angry if the other side won the presidential election — with supporters of the Democratic candidate now more likely to say they’d be angry if Mr. Trump won than they did in 2016, while Mr. Trump’s voters remain just as likely as before to say they’d be angry if the Democratic candidate won. When Americans were asked, last year, to describe our political system in a word, the Pew Research Center found “divisive” to be the most common response. (Two of the top responses needed to be redacted for use of obscenity.) We’re divided, we’re angry, we know that we’re divided and angry; we say that we hate how divided and angry we are, yet nobody seems to know what to do about it.

■ A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll conducted in late March showed a disturbing number of Americans — around one in five — say that they believe that violence may be necessary to get the country back on track. But even more troubling, to my eye, is the fact that younger respondents were far more likely than older respondents to say they felt this way. Forty-two percent of those under 30 said political violence may be necessary. I was struck this weekend by the observation that the shooting suspect was so young that he was not even able to vote in the last presidential election. While older Americans may look at this political moment and say this feels abnormally divided, for younger Americans, all that many of them have ever known is the era of American politics defined by Mr. Trump’s presence as a political force.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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