We know by now that Donald Trump has his ardent supporters, his fierce critics, and Republicans who don’t support him.

About that third group, Tim Miller writes:

There they are, deep in the wilderness. It might be hard for you to see them. After all they barely exist in the wild. They have gone nearly extinct. If you can’t spot them, you might be able to hear their labored breathing, seeing as they are simultaneously gasping for air and on a respirator powered only by their unyielding belief in norms.

It is the much maligned anti-Trump Republicans, expelled from the herd, lurking in the bush, waiting for the moment when they will determine the next president of the United States.

Wait, what?

Absurd, you ask? Maybe so. Far-be-it from me to predict the outcome of next year’s presidential contest. But a new series of PTSD-inducing polls from the New York Times showed that an election hinging on the exanimate Never Trump caucus is a live possibility.

The polls, which were taken in the six battleground states where Trump won most narrowly in 2016 tested the president’s head-to-head performance against his top polling Democratic rivals—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. The results were revealing and should jar any liberals under the impression that Trump has been fatally hobbled by scandal from their comfortable epistemic bubble.

Biden was the only candidate of the three to beat Trump in the hypothetical match-ups, and he did so by narrowly edging the president in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona while trailing in North Carolina. It was Trump who came out on top narrowly in the other-matchups, sweeping all six states against Warren and losing only Michigan to Sanders. …

Now there are plenty of caveats to apply here. Of course you don’t want to overanalyze one poll or settle on big-picture takeaways from small subgroups in the crosstabs. Most of the numbers here are within the margin of error. And we are still a year from the election. But they’re not nothing. As Nate Cohn points out, in the past few cycles the polls one year out from the election have been approximately as accurate as those one day before.

With those caveats in place, this poll suggests one real possibility where the determining voters in the next election are the very people I keep hearing are extinct—center-right swing voters. It is on their backs the Biden eeks out a hypothetical victory while Warren and Sanders fall to defeat.

That this possibility is dismissed so often—in favor of base-maximization politics only—has never made sense to me. Looking at the 2016 results, Hillary’s defeat was due in large part to four key groups:

(a) Voters who didn’t like either candidate but voted third party (there was a massive jump in this group from 2012-2016);

(b) Voters who didn’t like either candidate but supported Trump overwhelmingly;

(c) Voters who didn’t turn out (who were disproportionately non-white);

(d) The much ballyhooed white working-class Obama-to-Trump voter.

Three of those four groups were swing-voter targets for Democrats, not turn-out targets.

And who did the New York Times poll show as supporting Biden against Trump, but not Warren and Sanders? It wasn’t the Obama-to-Trump voters. It was the human scum.

Mr. Biden holds the edge among both registered voters and likely voters, and even among those who cast a ballot in 2016. He has a lead of 55 percent to 22 percent among voters who say they supported minor-party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, and among those who say they voted but left the 2016 presidential race blank. It comes on top of a slight shift—just two points in Mr. Biden’s favor—among those who say they voted for either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump.

Welcome Evan McMullin and Gary Johnson voters! You are the differentiators!

There’s more:

An analysis of the 205 respondents from the six core battleground states who support Mr. Biden but not Ms. Warren suggests that she might struggle to win many of them over… [They] are relatively well educated and disproportionately reside in precincts that flipped from Mitt Romney in 2012 to Mrs. Clinton four years later. They oppose single-payer health care or free college, and they support the Republicans’ 2017 tax law. They are not natural Democratic voters: 41 percent consider themselves conservative; 20 percent say they’re Republican; 33 percent supported Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson in 2016.

Conservative. Pro tax-cut. Living in suburban Romney-to-Clinton precincts. These are your classic Never Trumpers—and it certainly is not the voter profile being targeted by either the Democratic primary candidates nor the president.

The state-by-state crosstabs confirm this analysis. In Wisconsin, Biden does a net 5 points better than Warren in the crucial Milwaukee suburbs. Warren and Sanders both outperform him among voters with less education, but Biden gains with college and post-grad white voters.

Overall across the six states, Biden does no better than Sanders/Warren among the non-college whites who have dominated the conversation about the last election, while he runs up the score among college-educated white voters and voters of color. Harry Enten notes that this trend isn’t just in the Times poll. A recent CNN poll shows a big gap between the candidates among non-Democrats who might support one of them in a general election.

So while there is no reason to believe that the election next year will turn out exactly the same as one November 2019 NYT/Siena poll, it does show the political power and saliency of a group that is often dismissed and not currently being catered to by either party.

When it comes to the 2020 general election, as Jon Ralston would say: To all you Human Scum, #WeMatter.

At the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency, his attorney general (later reelection campaign manager before he was jailed after Watergate) John Mitchell famously  told the news media to “Watch what we do and not what we say.”

And so we have what Fox News reports:

Author and pollster Frank Luntz said Monday that President Trump’s rhetoric is having an effect on voters that he has never observed before.

Speaking on Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show,” Luntz said new focus group research from the past 10 days shows a majority of voters approve of what Trump is doing as president but disapprove of what he says.

“A majority of the public like what Donald Trump is doing and a majority of the public don’t like what he’s saying. This is the first time that I can remember. Usually, it’s the opposite direction,” he explained, noting that past presidents were generally liked by the public, but their policies turned off voters.

“Trump is hurting himself” with his language and his messaging, Luntz said, advising the White House to focus on economic growth, rising wages and low unemployment in order to improve the president’s poll numbers.

“Only 43 percent of Americans approve of the president right now. It’s his language, it’s his messaging, it’s his fighting with everyone. If he wants to be re-elected, he would do a lot better focusing on what he’s done for the country and stop this constant fighting with everybody,” said Luntz, author of “Words That Work.”

Kilmeade said that strategy would go against the president’s style and predicted he will hit back at his opponents just as hard as long as House Democrats proceed with their impeachment inquiry.

Luntz said Trump should remind voters that Democrats were elected in 2018 to work on issues like border security, infrastructure and health care, but are instead focused on impeachment.

“They have gotten nothing done, nothing, except for investigation … There have been more subpoenas by the Democrats than there have been laws signed into being this last year because of this impeachment. That is the best way to challenge impeachment,” he argued.

Nearly half of voters want Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a new Fox News Poll. In addition, 6-in-10 believe the president did ask foreign leaders to investigate political opponents — and two-thirds say that action is inappropriate.

Forty-nine percent want Trump impeached and removed from office, 4 percent say he should be impeached but not removed, and 41 percent oppose impeaching Trump. That’s about where things stood in early October, when 51 percent said impeach/remove, 4 percent impeach/don’t remove, and 40 percent opposed altogether.

The two-point dip in support for impeachment comes from a 5-point decline among Republicans, as 8 percent favor impeachment now, compared to 13 percent in early October.

More voters believe Trump asked Ukraine to probe his rivals (60 percent) and that he held up military aid as pressure to get what he wanted (52 percent), than favor impeaching him for doing so (49 percent).

One would think people would vote for someone who did what they liked regardless of what that someone said, but Trump defies usual rules.

Jonathan Chait:

In 2018, Democratic candidates waded into hostile territory and flipped 40 House districts, many of them moderate or conservative in their makeup. In almost every instance, their formula centered on narrowing their target profile by avoiding controversial positions, and focusing obsessively on Republican weaknesses, primarily Donald Trump’s abuses of power and attempts to eliminate health insurance for millions of Americans.

The Democratic presidential field has largely abandoned that model. Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.

A new batch of swing state polls from the New York Times ought to deliver a bracing shock to Democrats. The polls find that, in six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona — Trump is highly competitive. He trails Joe Biden there by the narrowest of margins, and leads Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Normally, it is a mistake to overreact to the findings of a single poll. In general, an outlier result should only marginally nudge our preexisting understanding of where public opinion stands. This case is different. To see why, you need to understand two interrelated flaws in the 2016 polling. First, they tended to under-sample white voters without college degrees. And this made them especially vulnerable to polling misses in a handful of states with disproportionately large numbers of white non-college voters. The Times found several months ago that Trump might well win 270 Electoral College votes even in the face of a larger national vote defeat than he suffered in 2016.

All this is to say that, if you’ve been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you’re probably living in la-la land. However broadly unpopular Trump may be, at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.

What about the fact Democrats crushed Trump’s party in the midterms? The new Times polling finds many of those voters are swinging back. Almost two-thirds of the people who supported Trump in 2016, and then a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, plan to vote for Trump again in 2020.

Perhaps some of that movement represents a desire by voters to check Trump’s power and restore divided government. But the poll contains substantial evidence that Trump’s party lost the midterms for the hoary yet true reason that Republicans took unpopular positions, especially on health care, and ceded the center. Rather than learn the lesson, Democrats instead appear intent on ceding it right back to them.

The “center,” of course, is a somewhat hazy concept, subject both to overinterpretation and misinterpretation. Capturing the center isn’t the only reason politicians win elections, and some policies that Washington elites consider “radical” are in fact popular. Nonetheless, it really is true that there are a bunch of persuadable voters who can be pushed away from a party based on their perception that it’s too radical.

And the Democratic presidential primary has been a disaster on this front. The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times.

Biden’s paper-thin lead over Trump in the swing states is largely attributable to the perception that he is more moderate than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Three-quarters of those who would vote for Biden over Trump, but Trump over Warren, say they would prefer a more moderate Democratic nominee to a more liberal one, and a candidate who would find common ground with Republicans over one who would fight for a progressive agenda.

There are lots of Democrats who are trying to run moderate campaigns. But the new environment in which they’re running has made it difficult for any of them to break through. There are many reasons the party’s mainstream has failed to exert itself. Biden’s name recognition and association with the popular Obama administration has blotted out alternatives, and the sheer number of center-left candidates has made it hard for any non-Biden to gain traction. Candidates with strong profiles, like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, have struggled to gain attention, and proven politicians like Michael Bennet and Steve Bullock have failed even to qualify for debates.

But in addition to those obstacles, they have all labored against the ingrained perception that the Democratic party has moved beyond Obama-like liberalism, and that incremental reform is timid and boring. The same dynamic was already beginning to form in 2016, though Hillary Clinton overcame it with a combination of name recognition and a series of leftward moves of her own to defuse progressive objections. Biden’s name brand has given him a head start with the half of the Democratic electorate that has moderate or conservative views. But it’s much harder for a newer moderate Democrat lacking that established identity to build a national constituency. The only avenue that has seemed to be open for a candidate to break into the top has been to excite activists, who are demanding positions far to the left of the median voter.

The primary has not doomed Democrats. Warren and Sanders are still close enough to Trump that they can compete, and new events, like a recession or another scandal, could erode Trump’s base. But the party should look at its position a year before the election with real fear. The party’s presidential field has lost the plot.

Warren is a particular problem, according to CNBC:

Steve Moore:

Joe Biden is at it again — living in his own parallel universe. The same former vice president who says that his son Hunter was hired by a Ukrainian oil and gas company because of his expertise in energy policy is now claiming that President Donald Trump has “squandered” the strong Obama economy he inherited.

Here is how Biden put it in a speech last week in Scranton, Pennsylvania: “Donald Trump inherited a strong economy from Barack and me.” Then he added: “Things were beginning to really move. And just like everything else he’s inherited, he’s in the midst of squandering it.” What’s next? Jimmy Carter taking credit for the Reagan boom?

Sure enough, two weeks after Biden’s jibe, the Labor Department released its October jobs report and what a blockbuster.  With revisions from prior months, the economy added some 200,000 new jobs, wages rose at a healthy clip, and hundreds of thousands more workers got in on the action by entering the workforce.  In other words, you can look long and hard for that “looming recession,” the media and liberal economists have been warning us of for the last several months.  It’s nowhere to be seen.

Today we are at or below record levels of unemployment, inflation and interest rates in half a century. Wages and salaries are rising at their fastest clip in at least two decades. There is an all-time high of 7 million unfilled jobs in the United States.

The Washington Post is freaking out about the continued good news on the economy — especially the latest data — that I reported on two weeks ago (on these pages): that median household income has increased by $5,003 since Trump became president. (The latest September numbers now show median family income up to $66,000 and $5,240 higher than when Trump entered office.)  This is based on census data, but the Post ranted last week that Trump continues to “inflate his own numbers.” Nearly every assertion in the article was wrong or twisted, and Trump was right.

What is especially rich in the Post, Joe Biden and others’ claims that Trump’s success is just a continuation of the Obama economy is that this time three years ago, these same Trump-haters promised that a Trump presidency would cause a “global financial calamity” and even a “second Great Depression.” The stock market would “never” recover from Trump’s election, Paul Krugman of The New York Times assured us.

Now — whoops — with the economy surging, all of a sudden, it’s just Obama’s doing. The double standard here is so transparent that only someone suffering from TDS — Trump derangement syndrome — would miss it. If the economy were crashing today, the left would say that it was all Trump’s fault. But with the economy doing quite well, Obama gets the credit.

The continuation of the Obama trend argument is leaky at best. First, Obama gave us the weakest recovery from a recession since the end of World War II. The economy grew by about 14% in the Obama recovery over seven years. In the normal recovery, the economy grew by almost twice that amount, or 27%. In the last Obama year, the economy slowed down to a piddly 1.6% growth, and economists warned that a “recession is right around the corner.”

Yes, Biden is right that at the end of the Obama-Biden presidency, “things were really starting to move” — in the wrong direction. That’s why Trump won the election. Nearly every poll in 2016 showed that jobs and the economy were the biggest worries of the American voters — especially in the Midwestern states that Trump flipped from blue to red.

Income growth had increased in Obama’s second term, but it flattened out in 2016. The surge in middle-class incomes started to accelerate in early 2017, after Trump took office.

Middle-class incomes have grown almost three times faster under Trump than under Obama. This is like trading in a Pinto for a Porsche and as you’re flying down the highway saying it’s just a trend.

Small business and consumer confidence as well as the stock market surged in the days after the Trump election and have stayed high ever since. Coincidence? Hardly.

More to the point, most of Trump’s policies have been to reverse Obama policies, not to continue them. Obama raised tax rates; Trump cut them. Obama grew regulations at a record pace; Trump has been rescinding them at a record pace. Obama negotiated the Paris climate accord — a $100 billion tax on the American economy — and Trump smartly pulled us out.

Obama passed Obamacare; every day, Trump has been finding ways around the law they called the Affordable Care Act, in order to reverse stampeding health costs and try to make health care “affordable.”

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The economy is far from perfect, and the latest weaknesses in industrial production, for example, are worrisome. The China trade standoff has clearly slowed growth in Trump’s third year in office. I would never say never to a recession in the next year or two, but I’m with Larry Kudlow: It doesn’t seem likely right now.

But the biggest threat to the economy right now is that we may repeal the Trump growth policies and return to Obamanomics. This is what Biden is promising, and if it comes to pass, we will learn the bitter lesson that the good old days under Obama really weren’t so good at all.