Trump 2024 Electoral College chances are fading…..

So says Nate Cohn over at the NY Times in a long analysis of polling, the 2022 midterm and other things….

There IS a undercurrent of information pointing at possibly VERY good election results for Democrats coming out of next years elections…

Remember?

Presidential elections are won by the number of state’s delegates…Electors

NOT the overall vote like every other election in America…

 

The early polls show Donald J. Trump and President Biden tied nationwide. Does that mean Mr. Trump has a clear advantage in the battleground states that decide the Electoral College?

It’s a reasonable question, and one I see quite often. In his first two presidential campaigns, Mr. Trump fared far better in the battleground states than he did nationwide, allowing him to win the presidency while losing the national vote in 2016 and nearly doing it again in 2020.

But there’s a case that his Electoral College advantage has faded. In the midterm elections last fall, Democrats fared about the same in the crucial battleground states as they did nationwide. And over the last year, state polls and a compilation of New York Times/Siena College surveys have shown Mr. Biden running as well or better in the battlegrounds as nationwide, with the results by state broadly mirroring the midterms….

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Midterm results typically don’t tell us much about the next general election. Polls taken 15 to 27 months out don’t necessarily augur much, either. But the possibility that Republicans’ Electoral College advantage is diminished is nonetheless worth taking seriously. It appears driven by forces that might persist until the next election, like Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters and the growing importance of issues — abortion, crime, democracy and education — that play differently for blue and purple state voters.

Of course, there is more than a year to go. Mr. Biden may regain traction among nonwhite voters or lose ground among white voters, which could reestablish Mr. Trump’s Electoral College edge. Perhaps his Electoral College edge could grow even larger than it was in 2020, as some Democrats warned after that election.

But at this point, another large Trump Electoral College advantage cannot be assumed. At the very least, tied national polls today don’t mean Mr. Trump leads in the states likeliest to decide the presidency….

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There’s also a chance that maybe, just maybe, Democrats might defy these unfavorable national demographic trends in states like Arizona and Georgia. After all, these two states lurched leftward in 2020, even though nonwhite voters shifted to the right nationally in that election as well. Clearly, other state-specific trends canceled out Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters: White voters moved more toward the left than elsewhere in the country; the nonwhite share of the electorate grew more than it did elsewhere; and Democratic support among nonwhite voters appeared relatively sturdy, for good measure.

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If those state-specific trends prevail over the national ones again, perhaps Mr. Biden can hope to get the best of both worlds: good results in the Northern battlegrounds, thanks to his national strength among white voters, with resilience in the blue-trending Sun Belt states where idiosyncratic factors might cancel out unfavorable national demographic trends.

With more than a year to go, none of this is remotely assured to last until the election. But at least for now, a tied race in the national polls doesn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Trump has a big lead in the Electoral College.

More…