President Joe Biden in recent days has maintained that he has a strong chance of winning reelection, but surveys in key states show the presidential race tilting toward former President Donald Trump.
The shift is especially stark in Pennsylvania, where he has trailed Trump in every poll conducted since Biden’s poor showing in the June 27 debate.
He has insisted things are fine.
“If you look at all the polling data, the polling data shows a lot of different things, but there’s no wide gap between us,” Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt on Monday. “It’s essentially a toss-up race.”
But Biden’s more optimistic assertion in a Saturday meeting with a group of moderate House Democrats — that he led the last three national polls by four points — is simply incorrect. In national polls, Biden went from a tie with Trump to trailing him by 2 percentage points.
“He is in a significantly worse position today than he was the day before the debate,” said Lakshya Jain, a co-founder of the democratic polling and analysis firm Split Ticket, which does not have any political clients. “The debate was supposed to be the inflection point — and it was, but in the wrong way for Biden.”
At the same time, while Biden’s Democratic detractors had been counting on a dramatic shift in public opinion to help convince him to step aside, they have not received it. Biden’s slide in the polls has been very incremental, leaving him within the margin of error in the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the three states most essential for victory in November. There has even been at least one set of battleground state polling — conducted by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult in early July — that showed Biden gaining ground on Trump since the debate, though still trailing him in the seven swing states surveyed.
“Trump is favored, but it’s not an ‘over’ race,” said Avery James, a data research analyst at Echelon Insights, a mainstream Republican firm that does not have any current clients active in the presidential race. “That’s been useful to Biden’s inner circle to secure him the nomination. They can basically look at that and say, ‘Oh, the damage isn’t that severe.’”
In a polling memo on Saturday, Biden deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said that polling since the debate showed the race tied.
“We’ve said since the beginning that this will be a close race, which is why we have a campaign that is designed to win a close race,” Fulks wrote, pointing to the campaign’s plans for $50 million of TV ads this month plus 2,000 coordinated staffers in battleground states, which he described as “an operation that dwarfs Trump’s.”
Several Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, are so concerned that Biden will lose that they’ve said he should step aside so someone else can be the party’s nominee. So far, 18 House Democrats and one Senate Democrat have said Biden should withdraw — less than 10% of all Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“The latest data makes it clear that the political peril to Democrats is escalating,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) wrote in an op-ed calling on Biden to drop from the race. “States that were once strongholds are now leaning Republican.”
No lawmakers have made similar announcements since Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump, an event that also prompted the Biden campaign to pause its advertising and communications.
On Tuesday, however, new signs of Democratic discontent emerged when lawmakers began circulating a letter asking the Democratic National Committee to postpone a planned virtual roll call that would allow Biden to formally clinch the nomination ahead of the party’s convention next month. The letter warned that the virtual roll call could start as soon as this weekend.
Seth Wenig/Associated Press
“Some of us have called on President Biden to step aside, others have urged him to stay in the race, and still others have deep concerns about the status of the President’s campaign but have yet to take a position on what should happen,” the letter said, according to a draft obtained by Axios. “All of us, however, agree that stifling debate and prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket through an unnecessary and unprecedented ‘virtual roll call’ in the days ahead is a terrible idea.”
The DNC scheduled the virtual roll call back in May so that Biden’s name could be on ballots in Ohio, which requires parties to nominate their presidential candidate 90 days before the general election — a deadline that falls on Aug. 7, more than two weeks before the Democratic convention in Chicago on the 19th. In May, the Ohio legislature passed a law to delay the deadline, but DNC officials said the fix won’t take effect in time because the legislation wasn’t passed on an “emergency” basis.
“This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a ‘dictator on day one’ ― so we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot,” DNC chair Jamie Harrison said in a statement. “We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket.”
But Ohio election officials insist the matter is resolved, and some Democrats don’t believe the early roll call is necessary to prevent Biden from being excluded from the Ohio ballot. Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), his state’s Democratic Senate nominee, told reporters Tuesday he didn’t understand why Democrats needed a virtual roll call before the convention because the Ohio legislature had taken action.
“They’d have to really explain to me why it’s necessary to go forward with something like this earlier than the convention,” Kim said.
Kim wouldn’t say if he thought Biden should remain the nominee.
“That’s the president’s decision as a presumptive nominee,” he said.
Part of Biden’s problem is that he was struggling against Trump before the debate ― and voters’ doubts about his age were a major reason why. Biden trailed Trump in all but one of the six battleground states in May polls conducted by The New York Times and Siena College.
His numbers in the more racially diverse states of Nevada, Georgia and Arizona were especially poor in those polls, reflecting attrition among Black and Latino voters. Trump’s lead in the three Sun Belt states remains at or above the margin of error, which helps explain why there has been so much focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the race remains tighter, but Biden is still the underdog.
What’s more, Biden’s suggestion that polling is no longer reliable might find a receptive audience within the Democratic base, but it does not actually pass muster.
“I carried an awful lot of Democrats last time I ran in 2020. Look, I remember them telling me the same thing in 2020. ‘I can’t win. The polls show I can’t win,’” Biden said in a July 5 interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
Biden also told Stephanopoulos that predictions of a “red wave” did not materialize during the 2022 midterm elections.
In 2020, Biden actually underperformed in both national polling and state-level battleground polling prior to the election. And in 2022, preelection polls — unlike pundit predictions — were surprisingly accurate.
“Past error is not predictive of the future, and error goes both ways,” said Jain, who supports Biden dropping out. “It’s just not a great idea to say, ‘Well, the data is going to be wrong, and that’s why we think we’re in a good position.’”
But the polling has remained close enough for Biden to sound plausible to rank-and-file Democrats who are not as privy to the details. And the more oxygen taken up by discussions of polling rather than, say, a steady drumbeat of calls to withdraw from Democratic elected officials, the better off Biden is, according to James.
“If the debate stays around the polls, then Biden’s probably got [the nomination] locked in,” he predicted.