CHRIS CRUCIAL: Joe Biden's narrowing electoral map

PLUS: Veep tryouts!

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1. A bad Monday for Biden

Well, this is certainly not the way Joe Biden and his campaign team wanted to start the week! The New York Times and Siena College did polls in 6 swing states and they found, almost universally, bad news for the incumbent.

Let’s first look at the raw results:

Arizona: Trump 49%, Biden 42%

Georgia: Trump 49%, Biden 39%

Michigan: Trump 49%, Trump 42%

Nevada: Trump 50%, Biden 38%

Pennsylvania: Trump 47%, Biden 44%

Wisconsin: Biden 47%, Trump 45%

And now, assuming there are no real upsets in non-swing states, here’s what the electoral map would look like if the Times/Siena polls matched the final results in each of the swing states:

(For the sake of the map, I have Biden winning a single electoral vote in Nebraska and I gave him all 4 electoral votes in Maine. Obviously if you move those votes around Trump goes up by a few electoral votes.)

Which, because math, would mean Trump would win — having secured well in excess of the 270 electoral votes he needs. Which top Trump campaign strategist Chris LaCivita noted on Twitter X:

As the Times’ Nate Cohn noted of the problems for Biden in the poll:

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanic voters, even though each group gave Mr. Biden more than 60 percent of their vote in 2020. Mr. Trump also wins more than 20 percent of Black voters — a tally that would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So, it’s bad. But, how bad?

My sense is this: Joe Biden was NEVER going to win this election in a landslide or anything close to it. It was always going to be a bit of an inside straight.

Assuming his numbers among young people and Hispanic voters, who showed discontent with the Democratic party in the 2022 midterms, are pretty close to locked in at this point, the poll data suggests to me that Biden and his team need to accept that their only realistic path to the presidency is through the upper Midwest.