President Joe Biden said in a highly anticipated Friday interview that he doesn’t believe he has fallen behind in the 2024 campaign, calling the race a “toss-up” despite a series of recent polls that have shown him trailing Donald Trump by 2 to 6 percentage points nationally.
Biden’s statements, during a 22-minute ABC News interview, came a little more than a week after his halting, confused performance in a debate with Trump prompted new questions about his abilities to campaign and to serve a second term as president.
Democratic officials and operatives ― and, presumably, millions of other Americans ― were watching the interview to see whether the debate performance was just a “bad night,” as Biden and his supporters maintain.
But especially for the political professionals, the interview wasn’t just a way to measure Biden’s abilities. It was also a chance to hear how he sees the state of the campaign and his ability to win it.
It seems clear Biden has a lot more confidence than his doubters ― and a lot less faith in the public opinion surveys.
When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos rattled off some of the recent poll numbers and said Biden has fallen “further behind by any measure,” Biden disagreed.
“You guys keep saying that,” Biden said. “George, you know polling better than anybody. Do you think polling data is as accurate as it used to be?”
Stephanpoulos then noted that in many instances, polls found Biden running behind Democrats campaigning for the U.S. Senate or other statewide offices. Biden dismissed the significance of those findings, saying, “That’s not unusual, in some states. I carried an awful lot of Democrats last time I ran, in 2020.”
Biden went on to cite several recent examples of Democrats prevailing in races that polls had predicted they’d lose.
“Look, I remember them telling me the same thing in 2020 ― I can’t win, the polls showed I can’t win,” Biden said. “Remember, 2024, 2020 … the ‘red wave’ was coming. Before the vote, I said that’s not going to happen. We’re going to win. We did better in an off-year than almost any president has done. They said in 2023, all the tough races we’re not going to win. I went into all those areas, all those districts, and we won.”
[The reference to 2020 sounded like he was about to say “2022,” which was the year Democrats defied predictions of a Republican sweep, just as Biden noted.]
Polling came up one more time, following a brief back-and-forth about Biden’s ability to challenge former President Trump, when Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you really believe you’re not behind now?”
“All the pollsters I talk to think it’s a toss-up,” Biden said. “It’s a toss-up.”
Then, after some crosstalk about which surveys showed which results, Stephanopoulos said again that polling shows Biden is running behind.
“I don’t buy that,” Biden said.
Biden’s take on the public opinion data echoes what his campaign pollster, Molly Murphy, said after the release of a New York Times/Siena poll on Wednesday. That survey found Biden trailing by 6 points among likely voters, although the Times’ own pollster noted it didn’t demonstrate a “fundamental change” in the dynamics.
“Both internal and outside polling confirm that the race remains incredibly tight,” Murphy said.
The Times poll did find Biden’s standing with independent voters improving. And even the most disappointing polls for Biden have not found Trump winning significant numbers of new supporters.
But the widely cited FiveThirtyEight.com polling average shows that Trump now has a 2.5 point lead. At the time of the debate, he and Biden were tied. Trump’s lead in the RealClearPolitics average has increased by a similar increment.
Just how much this all matters remains arguable.
Public opinion analysts agree that polling has become less accurate for a variety of reasons, including differences in response rates from different groups and, more generally, the difficulty of reaching people with cellphones.
And even Biden skeptics within the Democratic Party concede the race remains relatively close.
Their worry is that Biden’s abilities, or at least the perceptions of them, will make it difficult to eliminate whatever popularity gap exists.