The New Yorker:

Most polls show Donald Trump leading in swing states, but the Democratic Party strategist Simon Rosenberg believes the President’s chances are better than the surveys suggest.

By Isaac Chotiner

President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump by approximately one point in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. The gap is larger in most of the so-called swing states, including Pennsylvania (2.1 per cent), Arizona (4.3 per cent), Georgia (6.1 per cent), and Nevada (seven per cent). Moreover, in both 2016 and 2020, most polls ended up understating Trump’s support. This year, the head-to-head polls and Biden’s unpopularity have made many Democrats anxious about the coming election, but that feeling does not appear to have pervaded the White House. Axios reported last week that, “in public and private, Biden has been telling anyone who will listen that he’s gaining ground—and is probably up—on Donald Trump in their rematch from 2020.” (The Axios story says this sense of optimism is also shared by his “team.”)

One of the most prominent Democrats who seems to share Biden’s sense of optimism is Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Party strategist who runs the Substack Hopium Chronicles, and who is known to share good polls and good vibes with his audience on Twitter. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Trump’s polling numbers, whether the polls were really wrong in the 2022 midterms, and whether it is concerning that the White House is not more concerned.

A lot of Democrats and liberals are worried about the state of the Presidential race. You seem to have a different take. What do you think people are missing?

I think there has been a tendency in recent years among commentators to overestimate the strength of Republicans and to underestimate our strength. And we saw that play out in 2022. The fundamental dynamic of our politics, since the spring of 2022, has been consistent Democratic over-performance and consistent Republican underperformance. We saw it across the country in 2023. We’ve seen the same manifestation in 2024, with Trump struggling, and bleeding some of his votes, and underperforming polls in the primaries. And so, I think there’s just generally a view that, as people get closer to voting and have to go through that process of deciding who they’re going to get behind, Republicans lose ground and Democrats gain ground. And this has been particularly true after Dobbs. The whole political landscape in America changed fundamentally with Dobbs. And so any comparisons to 2016 and 2020, for example, I think are not valid because I think everything changed in 2022.

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