I try not to spend my days being a doomer or a catastrophist, but in both casual and formal conversations I’ve come to think that there is one very basic point about politics in 2024 that is being broadly underrated — Joe Biden is currently on track to lose the election because he has lost the confidence of some of the swing voters who backed Trump or Gary Johnson in 2016 but then rallied to him in 2020.

I don’t mean to engage in any elaborate forecasting or modeling or to be making any specific predictions about the future. It’s just that if you look at the polls, Biden is losing in most of them. And by margins that, while not enormous, aren’t tiny either.

Could things change between now and November? Yes. Could the polls be wrong? Sure. But there’s no particular reason to think that polling error, if any, will favor Biden. And while things could absolutely change in ways that favor Biden, they could also change in ways that hurt Biden. All we really know is that if the election were held tomorrow, Biden would likely lose. And I think more people need to understand this. Not because I’m trying to promote ill will or demoralization, but because I think people who don’t want that outcome need to understand that we are, in fact, on track for a Trump comeback, and they should consider doing things differently.