BOSTON (CN) — President Trump’s plummeting poll numbers have Republicans concerned, but political experts sharply disagree about whether the polls reflect a hardening verdict of the electorate or simply another temporary extreme of the wildly swinging 2020 pendulum.
“I’d be very, very worried” if I were the president, said Thomas Schwartz, a history professor at Vanderbilt University. “His poll numbers are bad, very worrisome, especially in places like Georgia and Texas.”
Ronald Schurin, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut, cautioned meanwhile about putting too much stock in polling four months out from the election.
“Anyone who says Trump is done is living in a fool’s paradise,” Schurin remarked in an interview.
Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump by almost 10 points nationally in the latest Real Clear Politics polling average, up from a 5-point lead only a month ago. In key swing states including Florida Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Biden’s lead is especially significant. And the race appears very close even in traditionally Republican states such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas.
As experts note, however, it’s unclear whether the electorate has made up its mind or is simply reacting to transient events — and what, if anything, Trump can do to raise his numbers.
One the one hand, Schwartz said voters have made up their mind “of whether their lives are better.”
“Trump has been around for a while, and the scale of disapproval people are expressing is different,” the professor added, citing a recent NPR poll that shows 49% of Americans strongly disapproved of the president’s job performance.
A Monmouth poll released Thursday found that 50% of registered voters were “not at all likely” to vote for Trump. (The figure for Biden was 39%.)
“Very few people are on the fence about the president,” and thus he might have trouble moving the needle back in his favor, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.
Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said flatly: “President Trump is in deep trouble.”
Michael Gordon, a former spokesman for the Clinton Justice Department, thinks Trump’s faltering numbers are the result of “real people” who don’t care about politics finally paying attention to the election and the need to make a choice.
In the past, “polls reflected Trump’s base of support,” the Group Gordon principal added. He said a lot of other people “always had an underlying discomfort” with the president but were “not highly focused on politics.
This fall, as they start to think about who they are going to vote for, Gordon said Trump's "deeds are coming home to roost."
Another problem for Trump is that bad poll numbers now can cause a vicious cycle where “people who would feel that they have to rally behind him if he were a sure winner may not feel that way,” Schurin noted.
“Never-Trumpers might be emboldened,” the Vanderbilt professor added. “Democratic contributors might be emboldened. Republican swing-state politicians might be lukewarm in their support and focus on their own campaigns.”
But many experts said the situation is highly fluid and poll numbers this early are not set in stone.
“We’ve had five events in the last six months any one of which would have been earth-shattering for a normal election year,” said Joel White, a Republican political strategist, pointing to the pandemic, the recession, impeachment, widespread racial unrest and the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. “This is anything but a typical political cycle.”
And even in a normal election year, “most people don’t start paying attention until after Labor Day,” said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
