Biden is facing a new political opponent: the polls

President Joe Biden tends to make his most vicious attacks on his political opponents at campaign fundraisers, away from the glare of television cameras. And, lately, one of his most frequent targets – second only to former President Donald Trump – is another persistent element of the race to 2024: public polling data.

“I don’t think any of the polls will matter anytime soon because it’s hard to get a good poll these days,” Biden told campaign donors in Chicago last month.

In another, in Atlanta, the president warned: “Nowadays, it is more difficult to make any poll rational.”

His criticisms of public polling data are as frequent – ​​appearing in at least ten of his fundraisers since May 1 – as they are technical, delving into the mechanics that he says may be delivering flawed results.

“You have to make – I don’t know what it is – 36, 40 calls for someone to answer. Almost no one has a hard line anymore,” Biden said before an audience of 3,000 people at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles last weekend.

“Are you blaming the caller ID for this?” late-night host Jimmy Kimmel taunted the president in response.

Biden’s criticism of the polls coincides with data that persistently shows a tight race between him and Trump, and the former president leading in some key states. These polls, as well as those revealing voters’ concerns about their age or their handling of the economy, have fueled Democrats’ nerves about the president’s re-election prospects. As the November elections approached, Biden tried to ease anxiety by addressing them head-on.

The president’s advisors do not dispute that the dispute is close and believe that it will continue until election day. Biden’s team also regularly conducts its own polls, which are more intensive and expensive than most public polls, and offer deeper insight into how voters are feeling, which informs the president’s view of the race because it’s part of his regular, in-depth campaign briefings.

Biden’s aides also say it’s no coincidence that he makes most of his spontaneous public comments about the polls in front of his campaign’s financial supporters, as they are among those most concerned about the numbers.

His comments take different forms, but each of them seems aimed at the same goal: to excuse or explain a less than ideal situation ahead of the November elections.

The president delves into the weeds of voting methodology, as he did at fundraisers in Chicago, Atlanta and near Seattle. He offers his own analysis of the donor situation: “We are the strongest among likely voters in the polling data. That’s a good sign,” Biden told donors last month. “While national polls basically show registered voters increased by four, voters likely increased by more.”

He blames the media’s presentation of the data. “While the press isn’t writing about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor,” Biden said at a fundraiser in New York in April. “The polls are moving closer to us and away from Trump.” At another recent fundraiser, Biden said experts “have been wrong about everything so far in the polls,” pointing to Democrats’ strong performance in the 2022 midterm elections.

“If you look at the actual primary votes as opposed to the polls, we are much stronger than Mr. Trump,” Biden told supporters at another fundraiser last month.

When reporters asked Biden about his poll numbers, his responses ranged from dismissive to angry. “Read the polls, Jack,” he shot to a reporter who was looking for his reaction to the polls that showed that many Democrats did not want him to seek re-election.

There are times when he says he doesn’t read the research. “This is a process and it will have ups and downs,” Biden said at a news conference during his first year in office. “That’s why I don’t look at the polls.”

In other cases, the president has gone into meticulous detail that suggests otherwise.

“In the last 23 polls, we’re ahead in ten of them, and he’s ahead in eight, and we’re tied in five,” Biden said during the fundraiser in New York, referring to Trump.

Biden campaign aides have had to spend so much time responding to public polling data that they have adopted the adage: “Polls don’t vote, voters vote.”

Asked about the president’s approach to polling, Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement: “This campaign does not allow outsized media coverage of the horse race and polls with zero predictive value to distract us. of what we know we need to do. be focused as a campaign to reach the voters who will decide the election.”

The president’s advisers hope, however, that his performance next week in the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election will give Biden a boost in the polls, or at least lower Trump’s position. And Biden’s allies this week joined in a poll which showed promising signs for the president.

“I share this only because I spend 70% of my time giving pep talks to nervous supporters,” said Biden campaign finance chairman Rufus Gifford. posted on X, linking to a new Fox News poll that showed Biden had taken a three-point lead over Trump.

A Biden campaign pollster has said at election briefings that the president is less interested in head-to-head numbers against Trump than in what voters say about specific issues, where there are big differences in how various constituencies view the race and especially , as those numbers change week to week.

“He takes all the research very seriously, but he is not someone who will ask himself: ‘Are we one more, are we one less’”, said the researcher.

Biden’s consumption of election data contrasts with the 2020 campaign, when he disliked regular polling updates on the road, especially in the Democratic primary, according to a former campaign official. And until his campaign received an infusion of cash following his victory in the South Carolina primary, Biden’s team couldn’t even afford to regularly survey voters, the official said.

A senior Biden campaign official said that while the president is now regularly briefed on polls, the metrics he primarily focuses on include how his campaign is engaging voters, such as how many offices they are opening and the number of volunteers.

“This is important for us as an indicator that people are accelerating, joining and paying attention to this campaign”, said the person in charge.

Another pollster who briefed the president on his campaign’s internal polling said the most effective approach has been to compare the data with what voters are saying in focus groups or to campaign organizers. The pollster said Biden’s response to the “harsh news” about his standing with voters was: “We have to fix this.”

“He always took the information and said, ‘Help me understand it,’” the researcher said.