First off, polls are not predictive but a snapshot in time. I wrote the linked article back in September, and the polls look even worse for Biden now than they did then.

For all intents and purposes, the polls show an ever-so-slight lead for Donald Trump. That’s where we are at, as per these polls. It’s hard to know how accurate they are right now for several reasons.

One is while polls did great in 2022, the presence of Donald Trump in an election throws them a little out of wack. The other is Americans are just not in a great mood right now, and reactions captured in polling might not be 100 percent about supporting Trump and hating Biden but just general malaise/rage.

Any poll this early should not, however, be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. These are warning signs and the stakes are very high, higher than ever for our nation.

They are telling us where Biden needs to improve, and he has 11 months to do so. For starters, he probably needs to figure out how to return Muslim-American voters upset about Gaza. This is especially important in Michigan, which has a relatively high population of Muslim Americans and was, prior to Gaza, practically a lock for Democrats given Gretchen Whitmer’s excellent work as governor of the state. Biden has to win Michigan as part of his Rust Belt firewall.

The good news for Biden is we have a lot of time before the election, time for Biden to turn things around. In addition, the majority of people right now just are not paying attention. I urge you, political junkie, to keep this straightforward fact in mind: We are all a little weird for being this interested in politics, and given how crappy the GOP has made politics these days, a lot of people are blanking it out.

Many people are likely vaguely aware that Trump had some legal problems over the last several months, but the specifics of that are likely pretty cloudy. Not to mention how much news oxygen the Israel/Gaza war sucked out of the room. In Trump terms, he has practically been non-existent in the news cycle, even with all the hearings and court news.

Also, the campaign season has not really started yet. How Biden’s people run his campaign has perhaps never been so important, given how our democracy is at stake. And that should be a large part of what Biden campaigns on next year. As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo wrote this morning:

The rule of law is on the ballot in 2024, and it trumps every other political and policy consideration.

It is the umbrella under which every other issue is addressed: Want to restore abortion rights? Want to openly debate Israel and Palestine? Want to accelerate the energy revolution to head off the worst of climate change?

Good luck. Because if Trump, as promised, harnesses the power of the federal government to attack his perceived political enemies, exact retribution for slights, overturn elections, eviscerate the right to vote, and continue the effort to lock in GOP minority rule, he will break the democratic mechanisms for adjudicating policy preferences, enacting new laws, and enforcing them.

Trump is promising a fundamental break with the rule of law and from that will flow a fundamental breakdown in democratic processes and institutions. It is as simple as it is hard to stay at maximum threat level for years on end.

If elections don’t count, if Trump and the GOP won’t accept defeat as an option, if a majority of the electorate can’t make its voice heard at the ballot box, then nothing else really matters. It’s as stark a choice as the United States has ever faced.

Will this be enough? One would hope, but that is hard to know. We have no idea what might happen in the next 11 months to change the complexion of the race. At this time in 2019, no one was expecting a pandemic. On Oct. 6 of this year, Israeli-American relations likely were far down the list of what people were moved by as far as their political opinion.

Turnout will be huge, as it always is. We had the highest turnout in post-sufferage presidential election history in 2020, and Democrats really need that level of turnout in 2024. Perhaps as more people are aware of what Trump openly tells everyone his second term will be like, he will slide in the polls. But that is hard to know. Certainty about how an election will turn out often does not work well for the people who claim to know, and more often than many will want to admit, certainty is not the smartest take.

The tl;dr of all this is no need to panic yet, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to get Biden reelected. The last word goes to Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.