Is the polling industry wrong, or is something else wrong?

[MT Treasurer]

My theory:

1.) Trump's support in national polls is currently inflated less because of polling issues and more because a lot of Democrats/D-leaners will obviously come home like they always do, making it a closer race in the end — even if not necessarily "close enough" for Biden.

2.) The 'pundit/Atlas demographic' (heavily white, college-ed, more affluent, liberal) is in an even worse position to pick up on a Trump surge than in 2016 because it is particularly strong among non-white working-/middle-class voters this cycle, whereas it was mostly limited to white voters in 2016.

3.) Obama-era narratives about high turnout benefiting Democrats (often in the context of partisan "demographics is destiny" or "voter suppression" discourses) have been disproven — there is no inherent high-turnout advantage for Democrats, and it’s not a coincidence that since 2016, Democrats have consistently fared well in most lower-tunout elections and generally worse the higher the turnout.

4.) While Trump is a very flawed candidate, he still has more appeal to a large portion of the electorate than the Republican Party, whose leaders are desperate to prevent the party's obvious shift away from Reaganism to Buchananism and a more working-class-oriented, isolationist, and anti-'globalist' message. The former remains unappealing even to a lot of voters who Trump gained in 2016 and 2020; hence another reason (besides "lower turnout") for the Republican failure to replicate or expand Trump's gains with those demographics in 2022. Trump at least has the right direction and the image of a strong leader, offering some sense of certainty to people.

5.) "Trumpism without Trump" matched against "independent local Democratic leader" who keeps his distance from Biden on the campaign trail has now worked to the Democrats' advantage since 2022, but it has made people forget just how unpopular Biden actually is. Democrats knew how to handle Biden when he wasn’t on the ballot (running as their "own men"), whereas Republicans mostly didn’t know how to handle Trump, in large part because of Trump's grip on the base, which is desperate for actual leaders and sees no leaders in the national GOP. Those Republicans who did in fact run as their "own men" (Youngkin, GOP governors in 2022) fared very well, even when they were attacked on abortion.

6.) Biden retiring wouldn’t "guarantee" a Democratic victory, but the fact of the matter is that Biden is currently the face of everything wrong in the country and in politics — weak leadership (a problem seriously exacerbated by his age), out-of-touch politicians who don’t see how their policies are hurting people who have to work for rent, wrong priorities that don’t change the status quo, politicians who have been in D.C. for half a century, etc.

Biden is not a leader/strongman and he has no movement — usually, those candidates (Carter, H. W. Bush, Dole, Romney, etc.) can only win in unusually favorable circumstances and don’t last very long, and they virtually never beat candidates who have both the strongman image and a movement. 2020 was somewhat of an exception to this, but there is a reason why Biden underperformed so noticeably that year, and it’s something few people want to talk about because they’re so focused on the binary outcome ("he won", therefore he was a good candidate — same mistake people made with Trump in 2016). The problem for Biden is that unlike in 2020, his favorability numbers are now hardly too different from Trump's and he’s seen as weaker and more partisan than in 2020. He also has no margin for error because his 2020 win was so narrow in the first place and depended on overperformances in R-trending parts of the country. Notice how much of this also applied to Jimmy Carter?