From Jonathan Bernstein:
Amid grim polls and a worsening economy, the president needs a quick recovery to save his re-election bid.
Sunday marked 100 days until the election, so I’ll break my general rule of thumb — which is to ignore the horse-race polls until after the conventions — for a day. And what those polls say is pretty simple: Former Vice President Joe Biden has opened up a solid lead over President Donald Trump.
How solid? Checking the averages: FiveThirtyEight estimates an 8 percentage point lead, RealClearPolitics says 9.1 percentage points and the Economist puts it at 8.4 percentage points. How big is that lead? Big enough. Even if the polls are a bit off and Trump is actually doing better, and even if he still has an Electoral College advantage and everything breaks in his favor, there’s no way he wins if the polls look this way in November.
But of course it’s July, not November. The good news for Trump is that despite everything that’s gone wrong, even a modest rally would put him close enough that a normal polling error and an Electoral College edge could be enough to win a second term.
The bad news for him is that it seems unlikely he can do that.