President Trump is facing the bleakest outlook for his re-election bid so far, with his polling numbers plunging in both public and private surveys and his campaign beginning to worry about his standing in states like Ohio and Iowa that he carried by wide margins four years ago.
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Mr. Trump has been consistently unpopular as president with a majority of Americans; his advisers have long seen his effort to win a new term as depending on the loyalty of his conservative base and the Republican-friendly tilt of the Electoral College — factors that could allow the president to capture another thin victory despite the strong possibility of losing the popular vote again.
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In private polling conducted by Mr. Trump’s campaign, the president is now well behind Mr. Biden, according to people briefed on the most recent round of results. Multiple public surveys this week have found Mr. Trump trailing Mr. Biden, the former vice president, by double-digit margins.
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The presidential election is still five months away and Mr. Trump, despite his political vulnerability, retains some important assets as a candidate. While Mr. Biden’s fund-raising efforts have picked up momentum, Mr. Trump is sitting on a considerably larger war chest and is resuming in-person fund-raising next week. There is almost no open dissent within the Republican Party, giving Mr. Trump a solid political foundation on the right from which he can attempt to rebuild his strength before the fall campaign.
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But Mr. Trump’s belligerent response to protests after the killing of George Floyd, a black man, while in the custody of white police officers in Minneapolis, appears to have worsened his political position even further, officials in both parties said. On an almost daily basis, he has issued a combination of wild threats and complaints about news media coverage and other personal grievances.
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There are also at least faint signs of renewed discomfort with Mr. Trump among a sliver of suburban Republican primary voters who could doom him altogether if they were to shift to Mr. Biden in November.
In a few states with primary elections this week, a smattering of suburban counties registered substantial, though far from strong, protest votes against the president from his fellow Republicans.
In Maryland, for instance, more than a tenth of Republican primary voters cast their ballots for Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who ended his quixotic campaign in March after registering in the low single digits in a string of primaries. With most precincts reporting, Mr. Weld was drawing more than 20 percent of the primary vote in two populous and diverse suburban counties outside Washington, D.C., that are rich with racially diverse and highly educated voters who have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the G.O.P. under Mr. Trump.
In Indiana, Mr. Weld took nearly 13 percent of the vote in Hamilton County, a suburb of Indianapolis, while in New Mexico a similar share of voters in Bernalillo County, home to Albuquerque, voted for an uncommitted slate of Republican delegates rather than for Mr. Trump.
In many of the states that voted on Tuesday, however, including Pennsylvania and Montana, there were only scant signs of protest voting, underscoring the extent of Mr. Trump’s dominance within his party even in a period of extraordinary political adversity.
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It is not clear how fully Mr. Trump grasps the depths of his political peril; when he was asked on Wednesday about trailing Mr. Biden in the polls, he replied, “I have other polls where I’m winning,” though he did not cite one. At times, his allies have taken unusual steps to try to calm his frustration, including commissioning and then leaking a poll last month that suggested that Mr. Trump had gained ground rapidly on Mr. Biden, people familiar with the efforts said, even as other Republican and nonpartisan polling showed the president’s numbers stagnant.
But Mr. Trump has been lashing out for weeks at some of his political lieutenants, according to people briefed on his reactions, who were not authorized to speak publicly. He blamed them for the difficulty of the campaign, comparing them unfavorably to the operation surrounding Mr. Biden. The president has complained that his fund-raising advantage has diminished, and indeed some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were caught off guard when Mr. Biden raised nearly as much money as the president in April.
“Biden has a team of killers and all I’ve got is a defense,” Mr. Trump has said to allies, taking a decidedly different view of the Biden campaign than most Republicans as well as a good number of Democrats.
NYT
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