RAJU: “One year from today, America will be going to the polls to choose a president. And there are alarm bells going off inside the White House this morning. There are three big polls out about the race for the White House and none of it is good for Joe Biden. The race for president is decided state by state, not nationally, so this morning we want to focus on a series of battleground state polls from The New York Times. In Nevada, Trump leads by 10. He leads by 6 in Georgia, 5 in Arizona, 5 in Michigan, and 4 in Pennsylvania. Biden has just a narrow two-point lead in Wisconsin. Now, Biden won all six of those states in 2020 and likely needs to win at least four of them to be reelected. And if you dig a little deeper into the poll, things look even bleaker. Voters in these six states say Biden’s policies have hurt them personally, and those numbers are flipped when you ask about Trump. More say Trump’s policies have helped them personally. And then there are huge cracks in the coalition that won Biden the White House in 2020. Yes, he’s leading among those demographics, but not by nearly as much as he needs to be. He’s ahead of Trump among young voters in these battleground states by one point. Trump wins 22 percent of black voters, which would be a historically huge measure for a Republican. And the margins are small for Biden among Hispanics and suburban voters. So let’s dig into all these numbers and the implications here with CNN’s Melanie Zanona, CNN’s Daniel Strauss, CNN’s Isaac Dovere, and Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press.”

[Allow me to throw a dash of cold water on Republican hopes in these numbers. While Biden’s doing terribly in these polls and getting worse, Republicans are not actually improving in an inverse ratio. Trump’s lead in these polls are more by default as the only other option rather than as a reconsideration of his presidency. This looks more like a signal that a lot of voters may simply sit out the next election, and those kinds of signals almost always prove *wrong*. Voters come home if they haven’t been convinced to switch. And what I’ve so far, especially when it comes to approval ratings, is exactly that — they’re not switching, they’re just bailing on Biden. For now, when bailing is cheap. — Ed]