I'm so full of Hopium right now. This is precisely why when Kamala Harris flamed out, I was advocating for Diamond Joe (albeit reluctantly).
The recent polls are absolutely eviscerating! The Fox News national poll released tonight almost matches the CNN poll that the Trump campaign wanted to sue CNN over. The Battleground states are still fairly close, but every single one of them is tilting in Biden's favor. We're actually in a situation where a landslide victory and winning the Senate back is totally in a realistic realm of possibilities.
Yeah it's still early and Hilary Clinton was also leading right now but the big difference between now and then is that Trump was an unknown quantity back then. He had never run for office at any level, there was zero track record from elected office to judge him. The main thing people were judging him off was his campaign rallies and his Apprentence/Real Estate Mogul persona he manufactured. Clinton also had super high negatives. So there were quite a few people in the middle were like "How bad could Trump be?" and he got the benefit of the doubt.
Trump is NOT getting the benefit of the doubt now. He's a complete known quantity. Everyone knows what he is and knows that he will never change or grow into the office. This is a referendum on Trump. Someone who is completely unstable and erratic, the Democrats put up the perfect nominee by picking someone who is the exact opposite, stable, boring, and a known quantity. The only chance Trump had was that if the Democrats put up someone who was perceived as "risky" and hoping the people in the middle would pick "the devil you know over the unknown".
Biden is far from a perfect candidate but he is indeed Trump's Kryptonite. Biden eats way into Trump's working class voters while also pulling away older voters. And still maintaining a strong coalition with women and minorities. Biden is owning the middle. For an incumbent to be polling at 38-39% with the challenger over 50% going into the summer that's a big big problem for Trump.
I'm sure some of the numbers will recover a little bit once some of the recent controversies fade from people's conscious, but Biden now has a HUGE margin of error to work with. And with COVID we're seeing more states that recently reopened starting to hit the first true wave spike. Trump is going to get even more backlash when even more people realize the Federal government was not even enforcing their own CDC reopening gating guidelines is a big reason why things are going sideways again with the potential for second lockdowns. If we have a second wave of lockdowns, Trump will be toast before we even hit the fall.
That said, I'm still highly motivated because I want to win the Senate back and that's going to require a large margin of victory not just a squeaker. But this race is already Biden's race to lose with room for several stumbles. I honestly think maintaining his health will be the most important thing he needs to do.