For years now, there has been a jarring disconnect in our politics: Even as President Trump’s numbers have systematically been bad to awful, public and pundit impressions of his political strength have run in the opposite direction.

This has been visible over the last few months, as Trump has consistently trailed presumptive Deomcratic nominee Joe Biden in polls, even as more voters have also regularly told pollsters that Trump is likely to prevail.

But over at FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley looks at new polling that shows this is changing.

For example, in polling by the Economist/YouGov, the percentage of voters who expect Trump to win has fallen from 45 percent to 40 percent, while the percentage who say Biden will win has moved up to parity with Trump.

Other polling has shown this even more dramatically, as Skelley notes:

USA Today/Suffolk University found a more substantial drop in Trump’s numbers. In late June, 41 percent of voters said they expected Trump to win, whereas 50 percent said the same in the pollster’s late October 2019 survey. Conversely, 45 percent said Biden would win in June, an improvement from the 40 percent who picked the Democratic nominee in October.
Republican pollster Echelon Insights has also observed a downward trend in Trump’s numbers: In a survey completed last week, 33 percent of likely voters said they expected Trump to win, which was down from 39 percent in the pollster’s June survey. Meanwhile, the share who thought Biden would win ticked up to 43 percent in July from 40 percent in June.

Those are real swings, and importantly, they are largely being driven by shifts among independents:

In USA Today/Suffolk’s June survey, 47 percent of independents picked Biden versus 35 percent who chose Trump, a reversal from the October 2019 poll, when 54 percent of independents expected Trump to win compared with 30 percent who said the Democratic nominee would win. And looking across the Economist/YouGov data since early May, the share of independents who expect Trump to win has slid as well, from the low 40s to the mid-to-high 30s.

As Skelley concludes: “On the whole, it seems voters are now less confident in Trump’s reelection chances.”

Why the shift? Well, the coronavirus crisis, the resulting economic calamity, and the civil unrest sweeping the country have all grown worse. These have exposed Trump as an increasingly diminished, floundering figure who blusters ceaselessly but visibly is either in over his head, has zero interest in addressing these epic challenges in a constructive way (he often appears to want to exacerbate them), or both.

Meanwhile, Biden has grown steadily more visible on all these fronts in a far more constructive, unifying and empathetic manner. He’s also running a good campaign, and Trump isn’t. This contrast may be encouraging voters to start envisioning a Biden victory as a real possibility.

What’s more, public impressions of Trump’s strength may reflect pundit attitudes that are also shifting. Because Trump shocked the political world in 2016, many pundits have defensively continued to presume that Trump wields almost Houdini-like political powers, even though large scale GOP losses in 2017, 2018 and 2019 should have undermined that belief.