Is a replacement really stronger against Trump than Biden would have been?

President Joe Biden was collapsing in general election polls and was way behind former President Donald Trump in swing-state polls. Biden was even more likely to lose than the polls indicated because he wouldn’t be able to campaign vigorously, and because he would most likely bomb his convention speech or a second debate — or both.

Ditching Biden helps the Democrats’s odds of keeping the White House in November. That’s obvious, because otherwise, very few Democrats would have called on Biden to drop out.

But how much does this move help Democrats? Some polls suggest that a new Democrat — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, or a governor such as Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer — would actually be the favorite over Trump in swing states.

These polls show something, but they do not show that Harris, Whitmer, Shapiro, et alia are ahead of Trump. The reason: Harris, Whitmer, Shapiro, and every other Democrat have negatives that aren’t picked up in a poll about a generic “Younger Democrat.”

Generic candidates always poll better than real candidates, because generic candidates don't have negatives. I wrote this about the GOP field last year:

“Generic Republican is the strongest opponent Biden could face because Generic Republican has no negatives. [Nikki] Haley is the closest thing to a flesh-and-blood Generic Republican, and that’s why she’s polling well.”

Democratic governors locked down their states and kept schools closed for too long. They have taken extremist stands on transgenderism in public schools and abortion. They have probably given corporate welfare to their donors, flip-flopped, and lied in provable ways.

Harris’s weaknesses are well-known and too long to list here. And yet if anyone else elbows Harris out of the way, that will introduce another negative, which is resentment from some of the base for pushing aside a black woman who was next in line.

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Finally, there is a reason Democrats went with Biden in 2020. He was the one who could defeat Trump. Biden combined blue-collar credibility with Country Club appeal, which allowed him to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

It’s too early to predict where this race will be even a week from now — since we don’t even know for sure who the Democratic nominee will be — but it’s safe to dismiss any reading of the polls as suggesting that Trump is now the underdog.