According to the polls, President Biden is currently losing. In the national surveys, Trump is winning by a little over 2 points. And just as in the past two times Trump ran, he’s faring better in the Electoral College than in the national polls, with a lead in the tipping-point state of Michigan of around three and a half points. (Biden has not held a lead in any poll there since November.)
Evan Osnos, who has written a new profile of Biden in The New Yorker, reports that the president and his closest aides don’t believe the polling:
A series of senior aides told me that they doubt Biden is trailing Trump as much as some polls have suggested. “Polling is broken,” one of them said. “You can’t figure out how to get someone on the phone.” Pollsters partly concede the point; few people these days are willing to be candid with a stranger about politics, and fewer still have landlines. “I think the only person who calls me on my landline is Joe Biden,” the aide added.
This may be merely spin, with Biden’s inner circle believing he needs to project confidence in order to hold up Democratic morale. But it’s possible that Biden and his aides genuinely believe this. If they do, it would be highly disturbing.
There is a persistent strain of thought among many Democratic partisans that polls showing Biden trailing are inaccurate. The theory goes that polls have missed Democratic Party strength in the 2022 midterms and a series of special and off-year elections, thereby demonstrating that polling predictably underestimates Democratic strength at the polls.
This theory is deeply unpersuasive. In the Trump era, Republicans have gained strength among low-propensity voters, while Democrats have gained among high-propensity voters. This means low-turnout elections systematically select for a more Democratic electorate, a reversal of the historic pattern. It does not necessarily translate to presidential elections, which draw a much larger cohort. In 2020, polls heavily overestimated Biden and underestimated Trump.
These partisans often point to the widespread expectation of a “red wave” in 2022. But that narrative was driven by reporters and pundits ignoring the polls, which showed a much closer split and no red wave. It is not a reason to discard polls. Polls are not and never have been perfect, and they usually miss the result by at least a little. But it is impossible to predict beforehand either the size or the direction of a polling error.
The polls may be underestimating Biden, but they may just as well be underestimating Trump. To assume Biden must be doing better than the polls indicate is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Why does this matter? Most immediately, an understanding of the state of the race informs the Biden campaign’s decisions. The president recently turned down a Super Bowl interview, which would have given him a vastly larger audience than almost anything he could otherwise get. If Biden were leading the race, such caution might make sense — maybe the risk of a gaffe outweighs the benefit of getting his message out to voters. But it’s a baffling decision for a candidate who’s trailing and desperately needs to let more voters know about his record.
More profoundly, a clear understanding of the polls is necessary to decide whether Biden will eventually need to drop out of the race. His defenders insist it’s too risky and unprecedented for a president to drop out and pick a new ticket at the convention. But this belief is mostly just a disagreement about Biden’s chances of winning. Everybody agrees that finding a new presidential candidate is risky. The disagreement is what to compare this risk against. There’s a level to which Biden could fall — say, down 10 points, or 20 — where nobody would be worried about the risks of replacing him.
And while this question doesn’t have to be resolved for several months, the choice to drop out is always going to be on the table. The Democratic National Convention has until August to select a new ticket, and even after, Biden could always quit and hand the nomination to Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The most disturbing possibility of Biden’s posture of polling denial is not that it’s sincere but that it comes from a sense of entitlement. According to Osnos, Biden’s view is “I’ve earned this.” In other words, he believes his presidency has been successful enough that he does not deserve to be facing questions about his effectiveness.
I personally agree and have written more than once that Biden has been an effective president and, in particular, that his Israel policy shows, for better or worse, that he is actually directing his policy and not being manipulated by his staff.
But actually being good at the job doesn’t matter if people don’t believe it. There are two broad reasons that the public doesn’t think Biden has done a good job as president. One is the inflation run-up of 2021 to 2022, which has made national leaders unpopular across the western world. Another is Biden’s age, which severely limits his communication and makes him appear feeble, even if that appearance is misleading. Both factors suggest that appointing a different ticket, with a candidate who does not present as elderly and doesn’t bear the burden of having presided over the inflation spike, could yield improvement.
It surely feels unfair to Biden that the public is denying him credit for his accomplishments in office. But life is unfair. The only pertinent question is whether Biden can overcome that belief. What the country needs is a clear-eyed ability to assess the challenge and formulate plans that respond to it rationally. The worst possible thing for American democracy would be if the people tasked with protecting it retreat to a cocoon of self-justifying denial.
