you are live in the "cnn newsroom." i'm jim acosta in washington. good evening. we're only one year out from election day, and already there are warning signs for president biden in his bid for re-election. a new set of polls from "the new york times" and sienna college show biden trailing former president donald trump in hypothetical matchups in four key swing states. you see them there on-screen. trump appears to have an edge in nevada, georgia, arizona, and michigan, all critical states that could hand the election to the former president. but legal problems continue to pile up for donald trump. tomorrow he is expected to have to answer to some of these serious allegations of fraud that he's facing. he's set to take the stand in new york for a civil trial that could determine the fate of his business in that state. so one year from election day, how worried should the white house be about these low poll numbers for joe biden at this stage of the campaign? cnn's senior data reporter harry enten joins. harry, i wanted to bring you back tonight to talk about these numbers. how bad is this for joe biden because the thing that you hear from biden world -- we have talked to isaac doe veer about this a short time ago. they'll say, hey, it's a year out. hey, joe biden has been in this position before. it feels different, though, with these numbers. what do you think? >> i think it does feel different, jim. you know, a few months ago, i said if you looked at the national polls, let's wait for the swing state polls. biden may be trailing in those important swing states. let's talk about the sun dbelt states first, arizona, nevada, georgia. biden won all of those in 2020. he won them by small margins but he won all them. arizona, plus five for trump. georgia, plus five for trump. nevada, plus 11 for donald trump. there wasn't a single poll to put on air throughout the entire 2020 campaign where joe biden trailed donald trump in nevada, and look at that. he trails by 11 points in this particular poll. perhaps it's a little bit of an outlier, perhaps not. the fact is when you look throughout the sun belt states, these are much better poll numbers for donald trump than we saw throughout the entire 2020 campaign. it's just so much different, jim. >> yeah, harry. when i saw that nevada number, the same thought flashed in my mind, that maybe that is a bit of an outlier. but, you know, when you look at what's happening in the great lakes states, places like michigan, wisconsin, what are we seeing up in that region? >> yeah. you know, when you showed the earlier numbers, you were looking among registered voters. i'm looking among likely voters here. with the exception of wisconsin, donald trump is doing better in michigan and pennsylvania than he was in 2020. you've got a tie in michigan, but look at pennsylvania. plus five for donald trump. that is a clear advantage at this point for donald trump. the fact is he can't lose all of these states and win the presidency. in that first slide, we had arizona, georgia, and nevada. if he's losing in those and losing in pennsylvania, adios amigo, goodbye, see you later. president biden cannot win. and the fact is these are far worse poll numbers than for joe biden than he saw throughout the entire 2020 campaign. there's just no other way around it. these numbers stink for the president. >> and what does the president have to overcome? what's the biggest problem right now? >> it's age. voters think he's too old. he's just too old to be an effective president. 70% of likely voters across these six battleground states say that joe biden is too old to be an effective president. donald trump, that number is 39%. if you look back at the 2020 numbers, joe biden's numbers didn't come anywhere close to approaching this. this, to me, is the big problem. i'm just not particularly sure how you solve that problem if you're joe biden. perhaps you go and show you can campaign. perhaps you try and bring donald trump's numbers up a little bit. >> trump's only three years younger. >> yeah, he's only three years younger. it's not like he's -- you know, this isn't a great difference. but the fact is it's all about perception, jim. it's not about the numbers in this particular case. it's about perception, and the perception is that voters believe that joe biden is just too old at this point. >> and there is time to return it around for the president, right? i mean this is something that we've heard from numerous experts that we've had on this evening. ronald reagan was in this position. barack obama was in this position. this has happened before. >> it has. look, we're a year out. we're going to examine the polls as we know them now. i'm not nostradamus, i can't tell you what's going to happen a year from now. if i were, i'd pick the winning lottery numbers tonight. how much the polls missed by in presidential campaigns since 1960. a year out on average, 11 points, versus a week out, 2 points on average. there is time to turn things around. but the fact is the president clearly has an uphill battle at this particular point. something needs to change. what that is, i don't know. but at this particular point, joe biden is at least, according to these polls, an underdog for re-election. >> all right. harry enten, we'll be talking a year from now, i suspect. thank you very much. thanks for coming in two nights in a row. >> jim, anything for you. >> exactly. 1y just not tomorrow night. for more, let's bring in staff writer at "the atlantic" david fromm. david, i know you were posting about this on social media. you've been writing about this. what do you think about these poll numbers? what stands out to you? >> we all want to live in a universe that makes rational sense, where cause is connected to effect. so when you see polls like this, you say there must be some reason for it. let's hunt for the reason. maybe it's interest rates. maybe it's inflation. as harry said, maybe it's the president's age. but i got interested in this question of the last time there was a democratic president in a first term, what did that president's numbers look like? that's barack obama in the second half of 2011. his numbers look identical to biden's now. not just for a week or two, but for almost the entire second half of 2011, obama had a disapproval rate over 50%, which is what biden has now. he had approval rates in the low 40s like biden now. the thought that occurred to me is maybe this isn't about the external world, inflation, interest rates, age. maybe it's about the way the democratic coalition works. maybe there's something in the voters that is explaining this, not the candidate. >> yeah. at the same time, david, you know, my experience being out on the campaign trail, you can have an intervening event. you can have stuff happen that changes the contour and the texture of the race. 2012, superstorm sandy. i mean that was it for mitt romney. barack obama had that event with chris christie in new jersey. certainly helped obama's campaign in the remaining days of that race. with hillary clinton and donald trump, you saw the comey letter coming out 11 days before the election. that certainly helped swing things in donald trump's election. might the middle east, what's happening right now, be a similar kind of event? obviously it's happening a year out, so biden has time to deal with it. but it does go to show you that sometimes things can happen. stuff happens that can affect the race. >> yeah, i think the middle east is a huge opportunity for joe biden because my basic theory about the race is that it's not driven so much by events. it's driven by deep stereotypes in voters' minds. the deep stereotype that voters have is that democrat candidates are weak and soft and they can't say no to anybody, and they especially yield to pressure groups. now, this is maybe a very false impression, but it's deeply rooted in the way we think about elections. as i said in the article, it's kind of crazy that donald trump is claiming to be the candidate of strength. this is a guy who can't walk down a slide. he can't open a jar of pickles without help. but that's going to be the stereotype. so biden with the middle east is showing strength. he's standing up for an ally. he's defying the extreme left in his own party. he's putting distance -- we saw tonight -- we saw yesterday in washington violent extremist attackers trying to storm the white house to get joe biden because they hated him so much, because he was such a good friend to israel. so that contradicts a lot of stereotypes that people might have about a democratic president, national security, and his relationship to the far left. it shows he is not a man of the left. he's a man of the center, which is where americans, i think, want their president to be. >> you recently wrote a piece comparing obama's low poll numbers. obviously obama ended up winning that election. one of the problems with these comparisons, david, is that, you know, obama wasn't running against donald trump. the stakes are just different. >> yeah. well, the stakes are for sure different. as mitt romney -- i mean i voted for mitt romney in 2012. he's a man of character. he's a man, obviously more conservative politics than obama. but when he lost to obama, i don't think many romney voters thought it was the end of the world. but here's what happened in that election, when you say what changes. so in 2012, obama -- actually his vote dropped, which is a very unusual thing for a re-elected president to do. usually if you're not going to lose, your vote goes up, not down. obama's vote went down, and he went down across a whole range of categories. but what he did was he turbo charged older black voters and got a level of turnout from older black voters never seen before. in fact, 2012 is the only election in american history where black turnout was higher than white turnout. it didn't happen before. it didn't happen since. so biden is going to have to activate parts of his coalition, and right now we don't see that because the democratic coalition is always kind of a mess and made up of all these discord ant parts that to activate them is hard. but donald trump will activate them. >> all right. david fromm, great analysis as always. thanks a lot. appreciate it, my friend. >> thank you. president biden has also been facing questions about his age and ability to steer the country as david frum was just talking about a few moments ago. but there's a lot more on this. i want to bring in host of fareed zakaria, gps. fareed, great to see you as always. your thoughts on these polls? are they surprising to you? this "new york times"/sienna poll and all these battleground states. >> they are surprising to me. and then i think about the kind of stuff that david frum talks about that if you look at obama's polls, i believe that if you looked at ronald reagan's polls at this point, john anderson, the third-party candidate, was doing amazingly well, and reagan looked like he was in trouble. but i do think there's something more to it than that here, which is worrying about biden because i think that some of it is expressing -- some of it is the normal cyclical stuff, which is people are dissatisfied, and the incumbent is the person you blame. but when it becomes a one-to-one contest, in reality, the race always tightens. but i think some of it is the fear that biden is just too old for the job. and i don't think that's going to get better in a year, and it could get worse. >> and the other place where these comparisons to reagan and obama kind of fall short -- and i talked about this with david frum a few moments ago. let me bounce this off of you. is that obama and reagan weren't running against donald trump, who is just a very difficult candidate to put it mildly. let me just show our viewers up on-screen right now this new "washington post" story that's coming out this evening. donald trump plotting revenge should he win. the headline, "trump and allies plot revenge just department control in the second term." the first line of the piece says donald trump and his allies have been mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate and/or prosecute, and his associates drafting plans to poteemploy the militar against civil demonstrations. fareed, this is the part of donald trump that i think the american people have forgotten about. progressives, they haven't forgotten about this stuff. but folks on the right who might be willing to vote for joe biden and folks in the middle, have they forgotten all this, that trump has this capacity? >> jim, you touch on what i think is a really, really important point, which is the problem with donald trump -- i have some disagreements with him politically, but the reason that i'm so worried about the prospect of a second trump term is that really donald trump does not believe in the institutions of liberal democracy. he does not believe in the norms of liberal democracy. he does not believe in the practices of liberal democracy. and as a result, to seek political advantage, he will mow down many of these laws, constraints, norms, and people, particularly kind of center right, tend to forget this. they lapse back into thinking, well, at the end of the day, i like lower taxes and less regulation, so i like trump. when he does stuff like january 6th, they recoil in horror, and they are opposed to it, to be fair to them. they're honorable people. but then somehow they forget, and then they start against lapsing back into low taxes, low regulation. hey, i don't like woke culture either. look, i don't like a lot of woke stuff either. god knows i would like to have my taxes lower. but we've got a much bigger issue here. this guy does not really respect and honor and cherish the institutions of liberal democracy. in that sense, he is perhaps the most illiberal candidate that, you know, the united states has fielded as a presidential candidate in my memory. i don't know of somebody -- maybe andrew jackson when you go back to the 19th century or something. but this is something very, very different. and why this isn't top of mind to a lot of voters is the great mystery. i understand the 35% for whom this is a cult. they love him. you know, when the republican convention takes place, you know, all he does is put on his family. he doesn't put on other republicans. but what about the center of the republican party? what has happened to that world? >> yeah. and perhaps -- i mean that leads me to this question, fareed, which is do the biden people have a point when you ask them about this, and biden himself has said don't compare me to the almighty. compare me to the alternative. when it comes down to a choice between biden and trump, these polls that we're seeing tonight are not going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference because people are going to be aware. people are going to be conscious of what donald trump is capable of. the biden people are going to be running ads with january 6th footage in them and so on. do they have a point about that? >> they have a point about it, but let's remember. lots could change between now and then. you know, biden could have a health episode. you know, and some of it might be trivial. you know, he stumbles. remember, gerald ford stumbled once. he was actually a very fit, athletic man. but that became the meme, and it became impossible for him to quite get over that. he could stumble in terms of something he says. he could have an actual health episode. the economy could, you know, worsen. i worry that it's very close. you know, the strange thing about the way we elect presidents now is this will be, i don't know, the seventh or eighth election in which basically a foregone conclusion that the democratic candidate will win the popular vote, will win it probably by -- i will guess biden will win the next election by 9 million votes. not a small number. but what matters is the votes in four states maybe -- arizona, wisconsin, georgia, maybe pennsylvania. and not even those states because the cities will go blue. the rural areas will go red. and it's going to be this ring of excerpts. we're talking about, what, 150,000 people will decide the future of liberal democracy in america, the future of ukraine and the international order, the future of the middle east. it's -- you know, it's scary. >> it is. it really is. fareed, stay with us. we're going to talk about what's happening between israel and hamas, how that might affect the president. but obviously the more important issue, which is how does the world get out of this jam that it's in right now with what's going onon t there. we'll tatalk a about that onon other sidede of the brbreak. be r right back.k. all right. let's bring back cnn anchor fareed zakaria. thanks for hanging in there with us. let's talk about secretary of state tony blinken. he's back in the region. he says there's, quote, no doubt that everyone would welcome a humanitarian pause in gaza. the israelis are kind of playing semantic games about this, a cease-fire versus humanitarian pause. we heard the idf spokes sman saying they've had pauses for civilians to get out of those areas in the north where there is shelling, where they say they're hitting hamas targets. putting that to the side, if there is a humanitarian pause, what happens then? >> it's a good question. first of all, it's worth pointing out that this is a really important test of american diplomacy. the premise behind joe biden's strategy in this crisis has been one that i completely understand and largely agree with, which is the only way you're going to have any influence on israel, which is the dominant military power here, the overwhelmingly dominant military power, is to hug them close, to tell israel that you support them, you have their back, you understand what the devastation of the attack, and then to use that political capital to counsel them on a wise course, on a restrained course, on a strategic course. biden's gotten the first part right. he's tried very hard on the second part. as my understanding is that the biden administration basically counseled the israeli government not to do a ground offensive, to do a more targeted, selective series of incursions. but it doesn't seem to be working. so what the biden administration has to ask itself is now that it has called for these humanitarian pauses -- and you're right. this is all semantics. the israelis are in fact doing none of that. what is the biden administration going to do? are they going to be more public, more vocal? are they going to make clear that this is very important to them? you know, bibi netanyahu has a history of pocketing american support and rebuffing any american pressure. he did this with obama. remember he famously went around obama's -- you know, around the oval office and lobbied against the iran deal. so this is a real challenge for the biden administration. >> yeah, there's no question about it. there's been tons of friction between the obama/biden teams and netanyahu for years now. you mentioned obama. he weighed in on what's taking place in gaza right now during this interview on the podcast "pod save america." let's play a clip and talk about it on the other side. >> if there's any chance of us being able to act, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas, that what hamas did was horrific and there's no justification for it, and what is also true is that the occupation and what's happening to palestinians is unbearable. >> obama went on to criticize the discourse on social media about this issue, which as you know is just totally out of control about this issue right now.