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**NOVEMBER 6, 2023**

On the Prospect website

Student Debt Relief's Narrow Path

The administration has lowered its sights. But what's left would still
represent an improved system for financing higher education. BY DAVID
DAYEN

The Ghost of Reuther Past

The new UAW faces new challenges, but bears some distinct resemblances
to the old. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Democracy and Reproductive Rights Are on the Ballot in Pennsylvania

When the GOP takes control of state supreme courts, they tend to end
democracy and ban abortion. BY RYAN COOPER

Will Virginia College Students Turn Out to Vote?

Getting young people to the polls requires a more holistic approach. BY
JELINDA MONTES

Kuttner on TAP

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****

****

**** About That

**New York Times** Poll

Lazy journalism allows flawed polls to become the narrative-but that
doesn't mean Biden is doing fine.

If you needed one more thing to be depressed about, you probably woke up
to the latest **New York Times**/Siena poll

over the weekend. It was hard to miss, leading the

**New York Times** front page with a two-column headline: "Voters in 5
Battleground States Favor Trump Over Biden."

And it got worse from there. According to the poll, young people and
prospective voters of color were disproportionately deserting the
president. And in an astonishing (and hard-to-believe) finding, voters
under 30 said they trusted Trump on the economy more than they trusted
Biden by a margin of 28 points.

The poll then became the day's major story. The

**Times**, in a companion piece, reported on Democrats' anxiety.
Former Obama campaign chief David Axelrod said almost in so many words
that Biden
should consider getting out of the race. Other media piled on.

Should this poll be taken seriously? The Siena Poll has a record of
creating self-fulfilling prophecies and getting some things seriously
wrong. In 2019, a Siena finding that Elizabeth Warren would not do well
against Trump helped drive her out of the race. On the eve of the 2022
midterms, Siena showed Democrats losing Congress by four percentage
points
,
a finding that generated headlines; the outcome a few days later was a
virtual tie.

As Michael Podhorzer has demonstrated, pollsters influence outcomes by
letting their own biases and intuitions tilt poll results by deciding
who to include in the sample. A month before its late-October 2022 poll
showing a four-point deficit, the

**Times**/Siena showed Dems up by two points. In the October story, the

**Times**/Siena showed Biden losing ground among independents and women.
But as Podhorzer writes
, "What
the paper

****didn't disclose was this:

**Independent voters hadn't changed their minds; the New York Times
changed its mind about which Independents would vote.**"

Do all prospective young voters truly trust Trump on the economy more
than Biden? Or just the

**Times**/Siena sample?

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The real function of the

**Times**/Siena Poll is to scare the pants off Democrats with a rollout
in the newspaper they intuitively trust. It inevitably leads to wild
mood swings and often bad decisions, motivated by a poll with an
imperfect record.

Notwithstanding these caveats, the latest

**Times**/Siena poll seems directionally right. The accompanying story
quotes a 53-year-old voter who supported Biden in 2020 and is now
planning to vote for Trump, though with misgivings: "The world is
falling apart under Biden." That sentiment rings true for many voters,
as does the

**Times**/Siena finding that 71 percent think Biden is too old for the
job.

The larger problem is a convergence of events that reinforce underlying
doubts. The most important of these are two wars at risk of becoming
prolonged quagmires. And in the case of Israel, rather than looking
strong by standing by an ally, Biden looks weak because Netanyahu is
openly defying Biden's plea to reduce civilian casualties.
Netanyahu's war has become Biden's war, and it is hard to see a good
outcome anytime soon.

Even with all of this, the bottom line that Trump is leading Biden seems
to defy common sense. What about all of those prosecutions? What of
Trump's recent threats that sound crazier and crazier? The problem is
that the more that the spotlight is on Biden, the more it is off Trump,
and Trump can coast along by being the non-Biden.

The comfort for Democrats is the

**Times**/Siena finding that a Trump conviction, rather than an
indictment, would chop six points off his lead

across the board, enough to flip most of the battleground states in
Biden's favor. But a conviction between now and November 2024 is
increasingly unlikely.

The finding that voters support a "generic Democrat" by eight points is
less cause for comfort. As soon as that generic Democrat becomes an
actual person, negatives appear. And even if Biden should heed
Axelrod's advice and quit the race in favor of a younger and more
vigorous candidate, Biden's baggage would not vanish. A successor
candidate would be under pressure not to reverse Biden's policies on
Ukraine or Israel. Nor could a different candidate cause interest rates
to drop.

Moral of the story-a split verdict: There is good reason not to take
the Siena Poll too literally, and equally good reason to be worried
about Biden and 2024.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

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