AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
Joe Biden’s problems have just gotten a whole lot worse.
It’s been clear for a while now that traditionally blue states have become competitive. Minnesota and Virginia, for example, have been close for a while, and some pollsters and pundits label them battleground states. New Hampshire appears to be competitive, as does New Mexico.
Even those states don’t show how badly Biden’s position has become because Democrats are now worried that another blue state has become competitive — even though it shouldn’t be. That state is New York.
“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,” reports Politico. “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.”
Biden aides have not focused on New York, committing no significant resources to a state where they expect the president to easily win all 28 electoral college votes in November.
But the warning 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 admitted to Politico. “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.”
Back in April, Trump hinted that he would make a play for New York because the state is close.
"We're very close in New York, I understand," he said at the time. "We're leading the country by a lot. A poll just came out a little while ago, as you saw yesterday that we have—we're up in every swing state and up by a lot in every swing state. So I think we're gonna do very well, and we're gonna make a play for New York."
Last month, former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) even said that Trump has a shot at winning New York. At the time, an Emerson College poll also showed Trump down just six points in a two-way match-up.
"President Trump is actually closer now at this point of this campaign than I was two years at this point of the governor's race," Zeldin claimed. "The state is continuing to shift right, and interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago, I looked at the updated voter registration data for the state, yet one might think that a whole bunch of Republicans, conservatives have just given up and left the state— well turns out that the Democratic party registration is down over a hundred-thousand, while the Republican registration's up, the conservative party registration is up, and people who are non-affiliated voters — it's also up."
Biden is most certainly still favored to win New York at this point, but if he has to spend resources there to defend the state, it likely means he'll have to divert resources from states he was hoping to flip. For example, Biden's people were hoping to flip North Carolina. If they’re trying to save New York, they aren’t going to waste time trying to flip North Carolina, where Trump has a 5.8-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
