I try to keep up with what Democrat analysts are saying, both because it is important to know thy enemy, and admittedly because there are people on the other side from whom I can learn things.

Yes, there are liberals worth listening to, and you should seek them out and read them. I don’t often change my mind, at least not quickly, but it’s a mistake not to challenge your own priors.

One person I follow occasionally is Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama Advisor and political commentator. I don’t tend to read him for policy analysis or opinion, but he has an interesting take on how politics works and gives you insight into how Democrat politicos think and what they are thinking.

Pfeiffer is appalled and worried that Biden and Trump are neck and neck in this race. He, like many liberals, thinks Biden is doing a great job as president and can’t understand why the public hasn’t rejected Trump.

Somehow, Donald Trump has been charged with 91 felony counts and is a statistical tie with President Biden in the poll. I dug into some of the recent polling to figure out why. Here’s what I found: https://t.co/CngmrwlgB5

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) August 29, 2023

Pfeiffer sees the race as between a competent and compassionate president and a felon facing 91 felony counts, and just can’t understand why there is any competition.

Rather than screaming “Can’t they SEE?!,” he dives into the numbers to see what is happening. Not so much regarding why people do or don’t support Trump or Biden, but rather who does and which way they may be persuaded to go with the right messaging.

[S]omehow — against all common sense — the 2024 election between a competent President and an incompetent criminal — will be incredibly close. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Biden up by only 1.4%. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5%. Given the strong Republican lean of the Electoral College, a Biden popular vote win of this size would likely mean that Trump ends up with 270 electoral votes.

Despite awaiting trial on 91 felony counts, Trump is a coin flip away from the presidency. Because of the Electoral College and our highly polarized politics, we should assume that every presidential election will depend on a number of voters smaller than the attendees at a Taylor Swift concert. But even by those standards, the race is closer than it should be. To answer why, I dug into the crosstabs of the recent New York Times/Sienna poll and compared them to Pew Research’s Validated Voter Survey of the 2020 election. Focusing on one poll is risky given the margin of error and general variance, but the New York Times/Sienna has an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight, and the trends I found in this poll are consistent in other high-quality polling.

This is a smart way to judge the state of play as things stand now. This analysis doesn’t give you insight into how to frame your messaging and isn’t intended to. Rather it tells a candidate whom to focus your message on. Having worked in campaigns I can confidently say that no candidate wants to waste time on speaking to either people who are sure to vote for you, or sure to vote against you. It is a waste of money and time.

So what has Pfeiffer deduced?

The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In the NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024. Among Biden’s 2020 voters, 2% plan to vote for Trump, 4% claim they won’t if the race is between Biden and Trump, and 5% intend to vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Trump loses 2% to Biden, 3% to another candidate, and 2% say they won’t vote.

This is to me unsurprising because my analysis of the two candidates is fundamentally different from Pfeiffer’s. Joe Biden is not a competent president, and only diehard Democrats think he is. I know that this belief of mine is not based upon any set of priors, but simply from looking at the polls regarding the Right Track/Wrong Track in the country. Biden’s own poll numbers have never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle, and voters have yet to see anything to change their belief that Biden is an incompetent, doddering fool.

Further, Biden’s pitch that he is clean and Trump an almost-felon is weakened by the fact that tons of people know, despite the coverup from the MSM, that Biden is as corrupt as John Gotti. Not enough people know because the MSM is doing cleanup on Aisle 5, but the clean/dirty meme is pretty weak given Biden’s corruption.

The other big thing that sticks out to Pfeiffer is that young voters are, unsurprisingly, not drawn to Joe Biden as a charismatic leader of a movement.

Shocking, I know.

[Y]oung voters are not yet as on board with Biden 2024 as they were the last time around. According to Pew, Biden won voters 18-29 by 24 points in 2020, but he is only winning them by 10 in the NYT poll. Biden won voters 30-44 by 12 points. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Times poll breaks out the age as 30-44, not 30-49, but Biden is only up three points with that group.

This change is not a bunch of young and young(ish) people deciding to support Trump. They are checking out of the election. — 9% of 18-29 year olds say they won’t vote if Biden and Trump are the nominees, and 16% of 30-44 year olds are either planning to vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.

It’s hard to know how important this factor will be because in the current post-COVID world of ballot harvesting a political machine can do ballot harvesting to get low-propensity voters to cast a ballot by removing all friction from the process. As a practical matter, a young person disinclined to vote but who leans Democrat may vote if prompted, assuming they have to do zero work. That requires an effective machine, which we must assume will happen.

On the other hand, the presidential election will be decided in just a few states and by a small number of votes in those states, so any dropoff should worry Democrats.

Pfeiffer makes no mention of any trends in other potential issues, such as a dropoff in minority loyalty to Democrats. And, it seems to me, that it makes sense to hold off from making any predictions there. Anecdotes are being pushed claiming a drift toward Trump among Blacks, but there is sparse actual evidence to prove that. Polls of minorities use small sample sizes, and a few videos on Twitter mean literally nothing.

I have long thought that Trump should do well with Black voters–I have compared him to rappers since 2015–but so far there has been no large-scale shift that we can count on.

I still believe that a different Republican candidate would be a stronger candidate against Biden, but that choice will be made by the voters over the next several months.

Can Biden reconsolidate his coalition? Not without a political machine taping it together. He is a weak politician and not well-regarded. As with 2020, their hope lies in mobilizing a political machine harvesting the votes of low-propensity voters, not in persuading people to love Joe Biden.