The 2020 elections are back

It’s Biden versus Trump.

To me, that’s the only real takeaway from Super Tuesday, when President Biden and Donald J. Trump won almost all the delegates at stake. It will be another week or two before they officially secure their nominations, but at this point the primaries are effectively over. The general election is about to begin.

On paper, Mr. Biden should be the favorite. He is an incumbent president running for re-election against the backdrop of a sufficiently healthy economy, and against an opponent accused of multiple federal crimes.

Yet according to the polls, Trump is starting the general election campaign with the lead.

Trump’s lead is modest but clear. Over the past four months, he has led nearly every poll in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, along with the states he represented in 2020 — enough to give him 283 electoral votes and the presidency. He also leads in most national polls over the past month, including a New York Times/Siena College poll last weekend.

This is not what many expected from a Biden-Trump rematch, especially after Democrats were resilient during the midterm elections and excelled in special elections by campaigning on issues like democracy and abortion.

But Trump wins anyway, and there is a simple reason for that: Mr. Biden is deeply unpopular. His job approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, and voters just don’t look up to him as favorably as they used to. Nearly three-quarters of voters, including a majority of Democrats, say he is too old to be an effective president.

Ultimately, Mr. Biden could win by tapping into issues like abortion and democracy. Historically, early polls are not particularly predictive of the final outcome. Many voters are not yet paying close attention, and there will be plenty of opportunity for the Biden campaign to refocus the electorate on more favorable issues once the general election campaign gets underway. The events of the next eight months will surely matter too – from the effects of a gradually improving economy to conditions at the border and conflict abroad.

But just because the early polls aren’t necessarily predictive doesn’t mean they aren’t worth taking seriously. Voters know these candidates very well. Mr. Biden is the president, Mr. Trump is a former president, and both candidates have been active in public life for decades. And based on everything voters have seen, they say they don’t like Mr. Biden and don’t think he’s a very effective president. This is no small matter.

The Democrats have won a lot of elections lately, but not like this. Since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, Democrats have stuck to a simple playbook: nominate acceptable, mainstream candidates and count on voters to reject right-wing Republicans. Mr. Biden himself was one such candidate in 2020, and even then he defeated Mr. Trump by only a narrow margin — by less than a percentage point in some crucial battleground states. His basic strategy hasn’t changed, but his favorability score is 14 points lower.

Democrats have done best lately among lower turnout voters, who tend to be made up of highly engaged, older, and highly educated voters. The polls show that Biden’s weakness is almost entirely concentrated among the less engaged, less educated part of the electorate, including many young, black and Hispanic voters. These voters do not participate much in special elections or even midterm elections, but they are more likely to vote in presidential elections.

There may be a grain of good news for Mr. Biden in his extreme weakness among less engaged voters: His campaign can hope they simply aren’t paying attention, and could return to his side once voters tune into the race. For example, my colleague Claire Cain Miller interviewed a voter who said abortion was the most important issue but blamed Mr. Biden for the loss of abortion rights in America. That’s exactly the kind of voter a campaign can hope to influence.

Mr. Biden may also hope that Mr. Trump will loom larger in voters’ minds as the election approaches. Trump’s strength in the polls is not because voters like him; he is judged just as unfavorably as he was four years ago. In fact, his ratings are almost exactly where they were before the last election. Many voters can look back fondly on the economy during his time in office, compared to post-pandemic inflation and Mr. Biden. On the other hand, a majority of voters say they believe Trump has committed serious federal crimes.

Trump’s continued unpopularity leaves a painful choice for millions of voters who liked and supported Biden in the last election but now have to choose between two candidates they don’t like, a group sometimes called “double haters.” It also makes for a challenging election for pollsters, as these voters are likely to have more volatile preferences. Many of them may not make a final decision until it is absolutely necessary – at the ballot box.

No one can say what these voters will do in November. Many may ultimately choose not to make a decision at all, whether to stay home or vote for a candidate from a minor party. What we know is that these voters were essential to Biden’s 2020 victory, but today they are not fans of his and are now telling pollsters that they support Mr. Trump in sufficient numbers to put him in the lead. That’s worth taking very seriously.