Democracy Corps is a Democratic polling group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville. Last month the group ran a poll of 2.500 respondents in battleground states. The results, according to Greenberg, were “grim” for Democrats.

Greenberg summarized the results: “This is grim.” The study, he said, found that collectively, voters in the Democratic base of “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”

On 32 subjects ranging from abortion to China, the Democracy Corps survey asked voters to choose which would be better, “Biden and the Democrats” or “Trump and the Republicans.”

Biden and the Democrats led on six: women’s rights (ahead by 17 points), climate change (15 points), addressing racial inequality (10 points), health care (3 points), the president will not be an autocrat (plus 2) and protecting Democracy (plus 1). There was a tie on making democracy more secure.

Donald Trump and the Republicans held leads on the remaining subjects, including being for working people (a 7-point advantage), standing up to elites (8 points), being able to get things done for the American people (12 points), feeling safe (12 points) and keeping wages and salaries up with the cost of living (17 points).

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the poor performance seems centered on President Biden because of his age and the impact of inflation. When it comes to House races, Democrats are performing better against their GOP opponents.

Despite the bad polling for Biden, there were plenty of Democratic operatives predicting he would rebound once the party settled in to the fact that Joe Biden is going to be the nominee and Donald Trump is (according to these operatives) going to be his opponent. As Simon Rosenberg put it, “Opposition and fear of MAGA is the dominant force in U.S. politics today.” He’s confident that the anti-Trump strategy will eventually work for Biden just as it did before.

But not everyone is as confident. Will Marshall, president of the Public Police Institute, thinks Democrats still face real danger from the extremism within the party. “Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism,” he said.

Yale’s Jackob Hacker (remember him?) argues that Democrats aren’t really as far left as they appear. He says the framing of Democratic wokeness and extremism is really a success of conservative media. “The obsessions of right-wing media with the ‘wokeness’ of the Democratic Party seeps into the broader media coverage, and mainstream sources focus on criticisms of the Democrats, in part to uphold their nonpartisan ideal,” Hacker said.

If you’ve spent any time reading left-wing progressives, this is a pretty standard complaint about how the media disfavors them in an effort to appear fair. But I think we all know in an election year the Democratic Party will get the benefit of every media call and will be praised by the left for doing so. Having lived through many elections, at this point I just take it as a given that when it really matters the mainstream media will always show its true partisan colors.

So the bottom line is that things look grim for Joe Biden now but we’re still almost a year away from the election. Over that time you’ll probably see a lot of disaffected and unhappy Democrats who are producing these terrible poll results, come home and commit to voting for Joe again. On top of that we’ll have the usual meta-battle over media coverage which will become more and more favorable to Democrats as the election gets closer. Those factors could combine for a surge of Biden support when it really matters.

But as always I don’t like this kind of prediction which assumes a smooth and predictable set of processes working out over time. Actual elections have inflection points which are mostly unpredictable and which are sometimes even hard to parse with the advantage of hindsight. Did Hillary lose because of her emails? Because she didn’t go to Wisconsin? Or because any of the half-a-dozen excuses she offered after the loss?

The point is something as simple as tripping and falling off a stage (or as hard to predict as a conviction in a trial) could have a bigger impact on the race than anything that has happened so far. For those who are sure the left will rally around Biden, I’d argue that could all change pretty quickly if people are suddenly confronted with the real possibility of a President Harris. All we can say for certain now is that Joe Biden is not looking like a sure thing.