On the menu today: A new slate of swing-state polls shows more good news for Donald Trump and more bad news for President Biden, making it more than fair to ask if the president is whistling past the graveyard with his insistence that “the polling data has been wrong all along” and that he’s really running ahead of Trump. Meanwhile, the Pentagon concedes that as far as it can tell, none of the aid offloaded at the new Gaza pier has been properly distributed to needy Palestinians; Biden fans attempt to gaslight everyone about the cost of living; and a special upcoming event for Denver-area readers of this newsletter.
Another Week, Another Round of Bad Swing-State Polls for Biden
This morning, Bloomberg News/Morning Consult unveiled new poll numbers from seven swing states, offering a glimmer of improvement here and there for President Biden, but showing Donald Trump remaining ahead in five of those states.
Biden’s up by a percentage point in Michigan, 46 percent to 45 percent. Perhaps the best news for the president is that this survey shows a tie in Nevada, where previous polling has had Trump ahead, sometimes by a wide margin.
But at the very end of the article, it reads, “The statistical margin of error is plus or minus 1 percentage point across the seven states; 3 percentage points in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania; 4 percentage points in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and 5 percentage points in Nevada.”
Beyond that, Trump leads by one percentage point in Wisconsin, two percentage points in Pennsylvania, three percentage points in Georgia, and five percentage points in Arizona.
In North Carolina — which I don’t think is really a swing state this year — Trump is ahead, 49 percent to 42 percent. The preceding six polls in the Tar Heel State have Trump ahead by five percentage points, six points, two points, three points, and six points.
The contention from Joe Biden is that the polls are wrong, and in fact he’s quite popular and Americans are happy with the state of the country.
“The polling data has been wrong all along,” Biden griped to CNN’s Erin Burnett earlier this month. “How many of you guys do a poll, CNN, how many folks you have to call? We get one response. The idea that we’re in a situation where things are so bad, folks, I mean, we’ve created more jobs. We’ve made more in a situation where people have access to good paying jobs.”
Axios reported, “In public and private, Biden has been telling anyone who will listen that he’s gaining ground — and is probably up — on Donald Trump in their rematch from 2020.” At a $30,000–$50,000-per-head fundraiser at the home of former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in Palo Alto, Calif., Biden boasted, “While the press doesn’t want write about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor, with polls moving towards us and away from Trump.”
Does that sound right to you? That the press doesn’t want to write about a Democratic incumbent having momentum against Donald Trump?
Now, both nationally and in swing states, there are a lot of pollsters in business. Indisputably, some are better than others. And you can definitely find outliers that have Biden in better shape here and there.
But every pollster has Biden’s job-approval rating in lousy shape. This morning, the new national Reuters-Ipsos poll “showed just 36 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38 percent in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022.”
If only a bit more than a third of Americans think Biden is doing a good job, would you expect him to have a lot of momentum in the presidential race? Yes, Trump is a deeply flawed candidate, but he’s also the most likely alternative.
Ezra Klein is among those on the left side of the aisle trying to sound the alarm for the Biden campaign: “To the extent polls have been wrong in recent presidential elections, they’ve been wrong because they’ve been biased toward Democrats. Trump ran stronger in 2016 and 2020 than polls predicted.”
Is Biden campaigning like a guy who’s well ahead? Maybe Biden’s latest round of race demagoguery is standard-issue for the man who told African Americans that Mitt Romney was going to put them back in chains. Does cutting off aid to Israel seem like the kind of move you make when everything’s going well? Does the administration’s obsession with forgiving student-loan debt suggest confidence in the likely turnout among young voters?
Pentagon: Okay, No Aid from the Pier Has Gotten Distributed to Palestinians Yet
Following up on yesterday’s Morning Jolt . . . oh, come the heck on!
Asked if any aid from the pier had yet reached Gaza residents in need, [the Pentagon press secretary, Major General Pat Ryder] said, “I do not believe so.” He said aid had resumed moving Tuesday from the secured area into Gaza, after what had been a two-day halt following Saturday’s disruption. He gave no immediate details.
[Abeer] Etefa, the WFP [U.N. World Food Program] spokesperson in Cairo, said she knew of no deliveries from the shore on Tuesday, however.
A couple of hilariously revealing exchanges at the United Nations yesterday, during the briefing by Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the secretary-general:
Spokesman: There’s been no new arrival of trucks on the floating pier since Saturday.
Question: And was the aid from those trucks actually delivered to the warehouse or to anybody on land?
Spokesman: On Friday, there were about 10 trucks that made it. On Saturday, there were 16 trucks that left the floating pier. But 11 of those trucks never made it to the warehouse. Crowds had stopped the trucks at various points along the way. There was, you know, what I think I would refer to as self-distribution. These trucks were traveling through areas where there’d been no aid. I think people feared that they would never see aid. They grabbed what they could. So, only 5 of the 16 trucks made it to the warehouse.
You’re going to want to file that terminology away for future use. “Officer, I’m not stealing, I’m self-distributing!”
Question: And has there been any distribution of any of that aid?
Spokesman: The aid is then . . . basically, WFP drops off the aid at its warehouse, and its local partners then distribute the aid as they can. But I don’t have that sort of granularity. I think, you know, the fact that the trucks didn’t make it underscores the need for consistent delivery of aid and obviously for a ceasefire so we have access to aid that is needed — so people know that when they see a truck, there will be more trucks, that there is more aid in the pipeline, and it’s not just a one off.
Question: And just one final question. Who was responsible for security for those trucks?
Spokesman: There is no . . . we don’t have any armed security. We operate separately, obviously, from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). So, part of it is the work that we do with various community groups and humanitarian partners so that people understand where these trucks are coming from and where they’re going and what they’re being used for.
As long as those trucks have no security, they’re sitting ducks for any angry mob. As the old saying goes, “If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.”
Gaslighting over Inflation
Over in that other Washington publication I write for, I note that nearly three years of higher-than-expected inflation has left me with a shredded sense of what “normal” prices are, and a much tougher time determining which prices are just “higher because of inflation” and which prices represent somebody trying to rip me off.
One anecdote that got trimmed by the editors: Former Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser has a radio show, and in a 2022 episode, he told the story of his sticker shock on a mundane trip to Burger King, ordering a Whopper and fries.
“The guy behind the counter, a kid, says to me, ‘Well, do you want the meal?’ And I ask, ‘What does a meal come with?’ He says, ‘a drink.’ So, I say no. He says, ‘okay, 13.72.’ My first reaction is, that must be my number when my order is ready! I’m number 1372! Then I realize they’re charging me $13.72 for a Whopper and some fries! I’m stunned! And I say how much is a meal? I figure I’ll get the drink. And he says $14.17. I got the drink. $13.72 for a burger and some French fries!”
The dramatic jump in fast-food prices strikes me as one of those factors that shape people’s perceptions of the economy a great deal — similar to the way gas prices influence people’s perceptions because the price changes a lot, and it’s listed on big signs by the side of the road almost everywhere. At a fast-food restaurant, people know they’re getting basic food, mass-produced quickly and often prepared by teenagers. It shouldn’t cost a lot. Every customer knows nobody behind the counter is getting rich. (With that said, California chose to increase the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour. Unsurprisingly, between last fall and January, California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs.)
It will not surprise you that in the comments, there are those who insist my perceptions of jaw-dropping high prices are driven by the fact that I supposedly shop in more expensive places. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Do you find that when you discuss inflation and the high cost of living, there’s always one person — often a Democrat or progressive — who insists that things aren’t more expensive, that this is all in your head or a reflection of your expensive tastes, and they know a place where you can get things for much less? They always claim to know some restaurant, some shop, or some gas station where everything’s at 2019 prices. But they never give the specific name of these places with such amazingly low prices and parallel quality.
Why, it’s almost like these people are deliberately misleading everyone, desperate to divert blame from President Biden. There are four lights, and they are dimming.
I fumed about this phenomenon on the NR Slack, and Dominic Pino dryly observed, “If only we had national accounts with data collected at consistent intervals that could provide us a clearer answer on this question for the country as a whole . . . oh wait . . . I’m being told . . . yes . . . it turns out we do in fact have such information.”
ADDENDUM: Denver-area readers, you are invited to a National Review Institute breakfast featuring me, NRI fellow Jim Geraghty! I’ll be talking about my trips to Ukraine, last fall’s trip to Taiwan, and the craziness that is the 2024 presidential race.
The breakfast is a week from today, on Wednesday, May 29, at the Cherry Creek Country Club, 2405 S. Yosemite Street, Denver, CO 80231. The event begins at 7:30 a.m. and is expected to wrap up around 9:00. Please RSVP here.
Alas, copies of the book won’t be available by then, but if you bring a sticker or something, I’ll sign it and you can stick it in the book when it arrives.
And no pressure, Denver-area readers, but we had a great turnout on a Tuesday night at the Kansas City Public Library, so the bar has been raised.