If New York Is a Battleground State, Biden and Democrats Are Doomed

Photo: Yuki Iwamura/AP

A toxic little nugget from Politico during a week of Democrats flipping out over the potential damage caused by Joe Biden’s recent debate performance suggests that the battleground-state map has expanded more than a bit:

Elected officials, union leaders and political consultants are panicking over polls showing a steady erosion of Biden’s support in a state he won by 23 points four years ago. They’re so worried they’ve been trying to convince the Biden team to pour resources into New York to shore up his campaign and boost Democrats running in a half-dozen swing districts that could determine control of the House.

Now it’s not exactly breaking news that “elected officials, union leaders and political consultants” in any one state invariably want every single nickel of available money to be spent in their jurisdiction, no matter what. They are amazingly selfish like that. So the worries of New York Democrats aren’t self-evidently justified, and national Democrats shouldn’t necessarily divert money from Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan to succor them. But are these fears even real? Politico thinks so:

[W]arning signs are impossible to ignore and have been building over the past year. Two private polls conducted in a swing New York House district and reviewed by POLITICO — one in September and another in March — found former President Donald Trump leading Biden there by 1 point, a virtual tie. And public polls over the last four months found Biden’s lead had winnowed to just 8 points across New York — an unusually narrow gap in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

“We’re still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been,” Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said. “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.”

If that’s true, Biden is doomed no matter how much money he sends to New York. Democrats have carried the Empire State in the last six presidential elections by 25 points (2000), 18 points (2004), 26 points (2008), 27 points (2012), 23 points (2016), and 23 points (2020). He’s not going to win nationally if New York is suddenly competitive, but Democrats aren’t going to flip the House in that situation either, unless ticket-splitting on an order we haven’t seen since the 1980s suddenly returns.

It is possible Biden could lose ground in blue states like New York and still win reelection thanks to the shifting demographics of each party’s base, as Sean Trende recently pointed out in outlining a scenario for the 2024 results:

One doesn’t have to be gifted with a particularly vigorous imagination to see what could happen here: Trump has substantial improvements among non-white voters, driving gains in some red areas (like Texas) and flipping some important swing states. He also makes gains in some blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, California, and New York, but is unable to flip them because the hole with educated whites is just too deep. Then, in relatively white Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan, very little changes.

But an eight-point Biden margin in New York won’t cut it. Is that really where things are? It’s unclear. The most recent public polling of the state from Siena College indeed showed Biden leading Trump by a 47 percent to 39 percent margin among registered voters. There’s no national poll against which to contextualize this result, but it’s worth noting that the last New York Times–Siena College national poll showed Trump leading Biden by nine points among registered voters. If that’s accurate, Biden’s doomed nationally, and New York has little or nothing to do with it.

The bottom line is that Biden needs to strengthen his national campaign, not go wandering off across an expanded battleground map where states he carried by a landslide in 2020 are back on the table. New York is not going to be the “tipping point” state that decides the presidency; if it’s in doubt, Trump has already won and will probably be planning his vengeance on the many New Yorkers who have displeased him.