ANDY MCCARTHY: Trump Can’t Win.

To have a chance in the general election, Trump has to make up that support. But from where? Polls consistently show that Democratic opposition to Trump is nearly universal. They also consistently show that his unfavorability with the general public hovers around 60 percent. There is no reason to believe this will change. To the contrary, about 54 percent of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he was more popular nationwide than he is now. He couldn’t win in 2020 with 46 (he won by a miracle in 2016 with 46). He is not going to win with less than 46, but there’s no reason to think he would ever sniff 46 again.

As unpopular as Biden is, recent Monmouth University polling had him beating Trump soundly even if there were a third-party “unity” ticket (the one hypothesized was Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) and Jon Huntsman (R., Utah). Maybe this is an outlier (910 registered voters), and maybe the Quinnipiac University poll discussed by CNN, showing Trump currently one point ahead of Biden in the battleground state of Pennsylvania (47–46) is more noteworthy. But I doubt it. Trump has done material damage to Republicans in the Keystone State — in 2022, he did more to get Democrats John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro elected, as senator and governor respectively, than any single political actor, and the GOP lost control of the state house for the first time in a dozen years.

Hence this headline at America’s Newspaper of Record: