Biden Campaign Sends All-Staff Memo in Effort to Calm Fears — And Beg for Patience As New Polls Loom
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
The leadership of President Joe Biden’s campaign sent out an all-staff memo Wednesday morning, attempting to calm fears amidst growing calls for him to withdraw from the race — and looming polls that are expected to have more bad news for the president.
Biden has been facing increasing scrutiny since his debate with former President Donald Trump last Thursday, including several moments in which the 81-year-old, voice raspy from an apparent cold, struggled to find his train of thought. Recent polling showed 72% of Americans do not believe Biden has the “mental and cognitive health to be president,” and on Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first sitting Democrat in Congress to publicly call for Biden to withdraw from the race.
The memo, according to Politico’s Elena Schneider, was sent out Wednesday morning by campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and featured “internal polling showing a still-tight race with Donald Trump,” including “internal battleground state tracking polls from before and after the debate, showing Biden dropping by half a percentage point during that period.”
Those internal polls might not sound too bad for Biden’s re-election prospects, but a new poll from The New York Times/Siena College is expected to drop Wednesday as well, and the memo acknowledged that it “is likely to show a slightly larger swing in the race.”
The NYT/Siena College poll has not yet been officially announced, reported Politico, “but rumors of its results have been spreading through Democratic circles for the past 24 hours.”
The campaign memo sought to downplay this poll and others expected to drop in the coming days by urging staff to “keep in mind that, just last week, the NYT themselves acknowledged that they are often a polling outlier,” and to view polls as “a snapshot in time” that will “continue to fluctuate.” Campaign leadership requested patience, adding that “it will take a few weeks, not a few days, to get a full picture of the race.”
An all-staff call was also announced in the memo, scheduled for midday Wednesday.
This article has been updated.
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