President Donald Trump’s reelection is having a tough week, with news that Brad Parscale will no longer be his campaign manager and new polls showing him losing to former Vice President Joe Biden by double digits. A Quinnipiac University poll released this week finds Trump losing to Biden by 15%, while an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds Trump trailing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee by 11%.
And in an article for NBC News’ website, reporters Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann and Melissa Holzberg analyze the NBC/WSJ poll and discuss the president’s “50% problem” — that is, 50% of voters who “strongly” disapprove of him.
“One figure continually stands out for President Trump in our new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: 50% — and not in a good way for him,” the NBC reporters explain. “Fifty percent of all registered voters in our poll ‘strongly” disapprove of the president; 50% say there is no chance at all they will vote for him.”
The reporters add that “51%” of registered voters “are backing Joe Biden in the horserace, versus 40% for Trump.”
“One of the old maxims of American politics used to be that an incumbent for any office needs to be at 50% to be safe for reelection — otherwise, there’s a majority of voters who exist that don’t support him or her,” the reporters note. “But Trump has a different problem at hand: he’s got 50% or more of the national electorate saying they strongly oppose him. And that’s something that a new campaign manager alone can’t fix.”
In 2016, Trump was in a better situation. While polls often showed him trailing Hillary Clinton, the margin was usually closer than it is with Biden, and both candidates were typically below 50 percent. That meant, as eventually happened, he always had the potential to swing the large group of undecided voters to his side. But if Biden is already pulling in more than 50 percent or more of the electorate, it's much harder for Trump to make up the difference.
Trump’s new campaign manager is 42-year-old Bill Stepien, a veteran GOP operative. Parscale hasn’t been fired altogether from Trump’s campaign, but he has been demoted and will now focus on the campaign’s digital activities.
Todd (who hosts NBC’s “Meet the Press” and MSNBC’s “MTP Daily”), Murray, Dann and Holzberg observe that while 50% of registered voters in the NBC/WSJ poll said there is no chance they will vote for Trump, 37% said there is no chance they will vote for Biden — which, according to the journalists, “leaves 13% who are up for grabs, saying there is a fair/small/slight chance they might change their minds about either Trump or Biden.” However, they add that “many of them aren’t likely voters.”
