WASHINGTON _ A months-long precipitous slide in the polls, an unfocused message, and deepening doubts about his ability to soothe a nation wracked by a trio of crises have suddenly recast President Donald Trump as an undisputed underdog in the 2020 campaign.
It's even raised the possibility that if conditions don't improve, Trump could lose decisively to Joe Biden in an election less than five months away, according to more than a dozen interviews with leading GOP and Democratic officials and strategists _ potentially upending long-held expectations that the White House race would be determined by razor-thin margins in a small handful of states.
"If the numbers were to hold and you had a big election, you're looking at things more aligned to 2008," said Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary for President Barack Obama, who won an Electoral College landslide over John McCain that year.
Members of both parties agreed that if the election were this month, Trump wouldn't just lose, he'd get "clobbered," in the words of one former high-ranking Democratic official. Nearly all who were interviewed described an electoral map in which Trump's path to victory in critical battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan has shrunk and even GOP-leaning states like Iowa have grown far more competitive.
The question on the minds of strategists in both parties is whether this moment marks a temporary low ebb for the president, or if recent events have more permanently changed the race and placed Trump's ability to win in even greater doubt.
The two scenarios could be the difference between a contest in which Trump might still ultimately prevail over Biden with slim margins in a few battleground states, and one where the president is in deep danger of suffering an electoral rout across the map.
"This is a pivotal time," said Brian Reisinger, a Wisconsin-based Republican strategist. "We'll look back on Election Day and be able to say if this time is when Trump was able to start his comeback or if it's when something more foundational changed."
Biden's national polling advantage currently stands at 8 percentage points, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average, with at least three separate surveys taken this month showing the presumptive Democratic nominee's lead swelling to double-digits. A new Gallup poll released Wednesday showed Trump's job approval plummeting 10 points since May, to 39%.
"If this election were held today, it would be Biden by double digits, easy," said James Carville, the lead strategist for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. "Things could change, but they generally don't."
Other Democrats, who remain reflexively cautious because of the lingering scars of 2016's surprise result, are still heartened by the data showing blossoming support for Biden and dismal numbers for Trump.
"I hate these kind of stories," said Patti Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. "It lulls our side into a sense of security. But yes, if the election were held today it looks good for Joe Biden. ... These polls, while great, and I'm excited and it makes me feel better than I did three months ago, I'm still very nervous about the outcome."
Trump, who won the Electoral College in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, also continues to lag in five of the six most important battleground states. He trails by an average of 3 points in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona _ margins that remain tenuous but strikingly consistent. In Michigan, Trump's deficit is noticeably larger at 7 points.
And the number of pathways for a Biden victory appears to be widening, with recent polls showing dead even contests in Ohio and Iowa, two states Trump carried comfortably four years ago, and glimpses of breakthroughs in Georgia and Texas, which would guarantee a Democratic wipeout.
Priorities USA, a super PAC backing Biden, calculated him receiving at least 305 electoral votes in its latest forecasting projections, officials with the group told reporters Wednesday.
"We've seen much of the entire map shift a bit, but shift towards the Democrats, so now states like Iowa and Georgia are within 2 to 3 points of making it a competitive 'Tier 1' state," said Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA.
On top of, a slew of indicators portray a nation rife with unease about the status quo.
In the aftermath of George Floyd's death and the ensuing protests, two-thirds of the country said the president has increased racial tensions. A staggering 80% feel America is spiraling out of control. Not even a third of voters believe the country is on the right track.
Top Democratic strategists say their data show voters who used to tolerate Trump's off-kilter tweets have grown less forgiving in recent months, given the seriousness of the situation facing the country.
"People didn't give a s--- about him lying 2,000 times before," said Bradley Beychok, the president and co-founder of American Bridge, a super PAC supporting Biden. "But now they care if he lies about something that affects their job, or their health, or their safety."
"Everything seems to matter a little more than it used to," he added.
In interviews, Republicans and Democrats shared a broad agreement that if Trump has reason for hope, it's because he has not yet been able to mount a sustained negative campaign against Biden _ not while the public and the president's focus is fixed on issues like protests over police violence, the coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession.
On Wednesday, as the Trump campaign unveiled a new line of attack comparing a masked and kneeling Biden to Antifa in a TV ad. Trump also said he will resume his patented large rallies next week in Tulsa, Okla.
Still, Republicans say going after Biden has become more complicated than they thought it would be. Attacks that could have begun immediately after the former vice president became the Democrats' de-facto nominee _ when his resources were low and the party was still fractured _ were delayed by more than two months due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
"I'm hoping for a traditional campaign between two traditional candidates," said a national Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. "If that happens, he has a shot. If that doesn't happen, I don't know how he wins."
However, in the month that Trump's campaign and allies have run a barrage of ads framing Biden as a pawn of China, the former vice president's numbers have only improved.
"Trump needs to make Biden the issue, but he's gotta do something other than say Biden is a liberal," said former Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell.
A significant swath of voters already have an opinion about Biden, Rendell added, and very few of them think Barack Obama's former vice president, who fended off Bernie Sanders in a primary, is an ideological extremist.
"It's difficult to rough up Biden because he's been around for so long and they already have an opinion about him," Rendell said.
GOP officials aren't sure when Trump's attacks will begin to fully grab the public's attention. Paris Dennard, Trump's senior black political adviser, indicated in an interview that the Trump campaign is eager to level a racially-charged attack against Biden.
"The message we're going to continue to hammer out is Joe Biden is a bigot. He asked us to look at his record, 44 years as a public official and his crowning achievement is a 1994 crime bill that led to mass incarceration of the black community," Dennard said. "Joe Biden has put out racist policies and he's a bigot. And we're going to make sure people know it."
Such a politically incendiary assailment poses risk. Biden, who earned deep support among black voters during the primary, is now considering several black women as his running mate.
Despite several trends working in their favor, many Democrats have trained themselves to envision the worst case political scenario to unravel: A robust economic recovery, the possibility of a coronavirus vaccine, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill _ all coming together to pull Trump across the finish line once again.
It's the one argument Trump allies use to remain unflaggingly optimistic, betting that 2020's dynamics will unfold almost exactly like they did in 2016, when the underdog climbed back into contention in the final weeks, defying political convention and many polls.
"I think things are dead even, maybe a little behind," said Scott Hagerstrom, Trump's Michigan director in 2016 of the battleground state. "This isn't about what people think today. It's what they think when they go and vote. President Trump has proven to be a master at pulling it all together."
