Joe Biden has an electoral math problem to solve

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — Forget the national polls that show the country has soured on President Joe Biden, and consider the Electoral College with less than 11 months until Election Day 2024.

Former President Donald Trump would need to flip three states Biden won in 2020 to complete his political resurrection and retake the White House – and a new set of CNN battleground state polls out Monday suggests that if the election were held today, Trump is most of the way there.

Biden, like Hillary Clinton, got millions more votes nationwide than Trump, but Biden secured the White House in 2020 thanks to the thinnest of margins in a few key states Clinton lost in 2016.

Georgia plus Michigan plus one more = a Trump win

While national polling suggests the country doesn’t much approve of either Biden or Trump, it is battleground state polls like the ones CNN released Monday from Michigan and Georgia that should raise serious questions about Biden’s ability to make the Electoral College math work.

Assuming Trump secures the Republican nomination (a pretty good assumption at the moment), if he can flip Georgia and Michigan and their 31 combined Electoral College votes, he would need to flip just one more battleground state that Biden won in 2020. These include Arizona, with its 11 Electoral College votes; Pennsylvania with 19; or Wisconsin with 10.

A lot can change in a year

That’s not to say Trump is a shoo-in. It will be a busy stretch of campaigning and criminal trials over the next year.

Trump faces federal and state charges for election subversion, charges for mishandling classified material, and charges in New York related to hush-money payments made on his behalf to an adult-film star who said in 2016 they had an affair. Trump denies that claim and maintains his innocence in all of the criminal matters.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the federal prosecutions of Trump, took the rare step Monday of asking the US Supreme Court to decide whether Trump has any immunity from prosecution. Bypassing appeals courts and settling the issue could help Trump’s first criminal trial get underway on time in March.

But his very real legal jeopardy has yet to put him in any kind of political jeopardy.

Stronger in Iowa

His primary rivals have failed to coalesce around a single alternative to Trump. In fact, a new NBC News/ Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll suggests Trump’s support is only growing in Iowa, which holds the first spot on the GOP primary calendar with its caucuses on January 15. He has the support of 51% of caucusgoers. None of his five rivals even hit 20% in the poll.

In Georgia, Trump could go on trial as soon as August for 2020 election interference – among other things, he asked local officials to “find” him enough votes to overcome Biden’s 11,779 margin of victory in that state. Although Fulton County prosecutors want the trial to begin in August, it is also possible the state trial is delayed until after the election.

A conviction could change things

Most registered voters in Georgia – 52% – say they approve of the charges, and a strong minority, 47%, say Trump should be disqualified from the presidency if the charges are proven.

But right now, Trump has a lead in that state among registered voters (49%) over Biden (44%) in a hypothetical matchup, according to the CNN poll conducted by SSRS. For context, when Trump won the White House in 2016, he won Georgia by less than a percentage point.

Small swings could change everything

A swing of a few hundred thousand of the nearly 5 million votes from Georgians expected to cast a ballot in 2024 is the key to the state’s 16 electoral votes. In 2020, Biden got 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Trump needs to pick up 38 more electoral votes beyond what he won the last time to reach the magic number of 270.

In Michigan, part of the “blue wall” Biden rebuilt in 2020, he beat Trump by 154,188 votes, a decisive improvement over 2016, when Clinton lost to Trump by just 10,704 votes.

Today, Trump is polling at 50% in CNN’s Michigan poll compared with Biden’s 40%. It’s telling that 10% of registered Michigan voters said they won’t vote for either man, but the frustration seems to be breaking against Biden at the moment in a hypothetical race for the state’s 15 electoral votes.

Biden has work to do

If Michigan represents the blue wall Biden rebuilt in 2020 along with narrow victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Georgia is part of the diversifying Sun Belt that Democrats have long seen as their future.

Biden won there in 2020 with the support of 88% of Black voters, a key constituency in Georgia, according to CNN’s exit polls.

In the Georgia poll released Monday, Biden gets the support of 71% of Black voters (vs. 24% for Trump), not an exact comparison since those figures are among all registered voters, not necessarily those who will turn out to vote in 2024. But it certainly suggests Biden has work to do to maintain Democrats’ diverse coalition.

“Polls don’t vote, but voters do,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, who added, “our campaign is hard at work reaching and mobilizing our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and MAGA Republicans’ unpopular extremism.”

Biden supporters are quick to point out that former President Barack Obama overcame voters’ doldrums in 2012 and that Democrats outperformed polling in the 2022 midterm election by only narrowly losing the House of Representatives and keeping control of the Senate.

Expect a lot more of that message as Trump’s criminal trials get underway next year.

By the end of another bruising election year in which both candidates attack each other and warn that the very future of the republic is at stake, no one is likely to be inspired by the system.

Interestingly, Trump’s lead in Georgia and Michigan is built on people who don’t always take part in the political process.

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy write:

Trump’s margin over Biden in the hypothetical matchup is significantly boosted by support from voters who say they did not cast a ballot in 2020, with these voters breaking in Trump’s favor by 26 points in Georgia and 40 points in Michigan.

Those who report having voted in 2020 say they broke for Biden over Trump in that election, but as of now, they tilt in Trump’s favor for 2024 in both states, with Biden holding on to fewer of his 2020 backers than does Trump.

CNN’s Arlette Saenz notes that Biden, perhaps testing material before the general election campaign gets into full swing, has slowly started to find ways to single out Trump, the leader of the GOP pack, at his events, with the most forceful pushbacks coming in off-camera fundraisers.

“The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy,” he told a donor crowd in Los Angeles over the weekend. “Because if we lost that, we lose everything.”

Biden is also beginning to ramp up his visits to battleground states. On Monday, he headed to Pennsylvania, another key state he won in 2020, visiting a Philadelphia firehouse to tout more than $22 million in federal grant money that will fund the salaries of 72 firefighters and allow the city to reopen three previously closed fired companies.

That’s one small event with a very targeted audience, but he’s entering a campaign that could be decided by a small number of voters in specific states.

The-CNN-Wire
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