[NY Times] Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished

this link will work for everyone

Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...e_code=1.6k0.nwmJ.EpAW8ado2yZQ&smid=url-share

excerpt:

Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished
July 12, 2024
By Doug Sosnik
Graphics by Quoctrung Bui
Mr. Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and has advised over 50 governors and U.S. senators.

President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.

Mr. Trump is now the clear front-runner to be the next president of the United States.

As I did for Times Opinion in April, I’ve drawn on my years as a Democratic strategist to look at polling, advertising and campaign spending in the key states in this election. As several maps illustrate below, I’ve never seen such a grim Electoral College landscape for Mr. Biden: He not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020, he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.

Mr. Biden’s problems run much deeper than one bad debate. By spring, he had the lowest job approval average of any recent president seeking re-election since George H.W. Bush in 1992. His support has dropped by nearly a net 10 points since the 2022 midterm elections.

The Biden campaign hoped to change this political dynamic by calling for a historic early debate in June. What made Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance so devastating was that it reinforced voters’ strongest negative idea about his candidacy: that he is simply too old to run for re-election. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate, 74 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was too old to govern another term in office.

Due to his worsening political situation, Mr. Biden now has only one narrow path to winning 270 electoral votes and the presidency in November, a more dire situation than he faced when I looked at his potential paths in April and a reality his campaign acknowledged in a strategy memo on Thursday.

If Mr. Biden cannot demonstrate that he is still up to the job of being president, and do it soon — with a vision for where he wants to lead the country — it won’t matter what the voters think about Mr. Trump when the fall election begins.
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more at the link, with a considerable amount of attention devoted to the electoral college math

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