What Exactly Is Biden Getting Told These Days about the Polls?

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, October 27, 2022

 

Yesterday, Politico ran a story with the headline, “Biden insists the polls will turn in his favor. Privately, the White House is anxious.” Sometime after I tweeted about it, the headline changed to “Election anxiety creeps inside the White House.”

 

I noted that it feels like every day we get some headline that is a version of, “Amidst a long run of bad news, President Biden insists good news is just around the corner.” Inflation is temporary, or it’s at zero percent, or it’s peaked, or it’s tapering off. The economy is “strong as hell.” The border is secure. There’s optimism, and then there’s blind denial.

 

That Politico article noted:

 

In the stretch run before the election, Biden has held far fewer events than his immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, did in the closing weeks of their own first midterm election season. The president is slated for a trip to upstate New York on Thursday but did not campaign last weekend — and he currently has no campaign events planned for this coming weekend, just 10 days before voters go to the polls. On both weekends, he has opted instead to remain at one of his Delaware homes.

 

As I have been metaphorically shouting all autumn, this is highly abnormal. Either Biden is too unpopular to be of any use to any Democrats other than in a handful of races, or as he approaches his 80th birthday he doesn’t have the stamina to handle the traditional late-campaign schedule, or both.

 

Recall that back in 2006, President George W. Bush was awfully unpopular, with a job-approval rating below 40 percent. And yet, Bush went out and held rallies with Republican candidates in then-solidly red states such as Indiana, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Nebraska. Obama campaigned all over the country in 2010 and 2014, even though his approval rating was lousy, and Trump did the same in 2018.

 

I remind you, Biden’s absence from the campaign trail and weekends at home was not the plan, as of a few months ago. In late August, Biden attended a traditional-style Democratic Party rally in Rockville, Md., and White House officials told the New York Times that Biden was “embracing the role as his party’s top campaigner.”

 

One of the few places it has been safe for President Biden to hold something akin to a traditional rally was literally inside the Democratic National Committee’s offices Monday. And once again, Biden stated he was seeing an imminent victory that no one else sees.

 

“Whether we maintain control of the Senate and the House is a big deal. And so far, we’re running against the tide, and we’re beating the tide!” Biden said.

 

Where? Where, in this political environment, are Democrats beating the tide?  The only group who has beaten a tide this autumn is the University of Tennessee football team.

 

Thankfully, Biden spared us the cliché, “The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day.” But he insisted that the polling was just too contradictory to be a useful measurement of the state of the electorate:

 

The polls have been all over the place. First of all, if you speak to most pollsters, they’re not sure anymore — not about the outcome, but about polling. No, I’m not being facetious. It’s awful hard to do it these days. It’s awful hard to do it these days. “Republicans ahead.” “Democrats ahead.” “Republicans ahead.” But it’s going to close, I think, with seeing one more shift: “Democrats ahead” in the closing days.

 

But the polls really aren’t vague or contradictory this fall. In the generic-ballot question, Republicans have led 15 of the last 18 public polls, and most people think Democrats need to be ahead by three or four percentage points to keep the House. Democrats got excited when the Politico/Morning Consult survey showed them ahead by four percentage points, but that was a poll of registered voters, not likely voters.

 

The polls aren’t just bad for Democrats; some of the results almost look too good for Republicans.

 

What are we to make of a Fox/Insider Advantage poll in Arizona that has Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake ahead of Democrat Katie Hobbs by eleven points? (By refusing to debate, Hobbs is going to be remembered as the Martha Coakley of this election cycle — an entitled, down-ticket state official with spectacularly bad instincts who fumbled away a race that, on paper, she had at least a decent shot of winning.)

 

What are we to make of Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm, finding Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating Charlie Crist by twelve points? Or the University of North Florida survey finding DeSantis ahead by 14 points?

 

What are we to make of the last bunch of surveys of likely voters in Texas putting Greg Abbott ahead by nine to eleven points?

 

If Republicans are winning the governor’s races by double-digit or near-double-digit margins, they will likely also enjoy sweeping down-ticket state legislative wins in Arizona, Florida, and Texas. FiveThirtyEight noted this week that Democrats could lose control of the state legislatures in Nevada, Maine, and Oregon. Republicans could win complete control of state legislatures in Alaska, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

 

Speaking of Wisconsin, that Politico article also mentioned, “Biden has voiced strong interest in seeing incumbent Republican Ron Johnson defeated in Wisconsin.” Johnson hasn’t trailed in a poll since early September. Has anyone told Biden how that Senate race is going for Mandela Barnes?

 

What is Biden being told about the outlook for Democrats in the midterms? Back in May, he publicly predicted that Democrats would add three more Senate seats to their current “majority” of 50 seats. This week’s confident “We’re beating the tide!” declaration is the inverse of his nuclear “Armageddon” warning at a Democratic fundraiser, which left the rest of the U.S. government, including the parts assigned the vital duty of watching Russia’s nuclear arsenal, scratching their heads and wondering what the president was talking about.

 

To whom is Biden listening? To whom is he talking? What is he reading? What is being discussed in his briefings? There’s this unnerving pattern in which the president regularly blurts out things that seem disconnected from reality or blatantly contradict his earlier statements.

 

Earlier this week, Biden did an event urging Americans to get their Covid-19 booster shots, and his off-the-cuff remarks veered into ominous doomsaying:

 

As we know, this virus is constantly changing. New variants have emerged here in the U.S. and around the world. We’ve seen cases and hospitalizations rise in Europe in recent weeks. Your old vaccine or your previous Covid infection will not give you maximum protection. Let me as plain as I — let me be as plain as I can. We still have hundreds of people dying each day from Covid in this country — hundreds. That number is likely to rise this winter.

 

That stern warning about the lingering threat is very hard to rectify with Biden’s statement from five weeks ago that, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

 

It’s just the continuing adventures of President Mr. Magoo, making grandiose promises — “I’m going to shut down the virus!” “We’re gonna cure cancer!” — and stumbling and wandering and insisting everything is going great, you’ve never had it so good, and anything that is going wrong is somebody else’s fault. Infant formula is easier to find than it was a few months ago, but NPR reports this morning that the ability to find it in stores is hit and miss, depending upon where you live. “We are nowhere close to anywhere near being at a normal supply compared to May,” a pediatrician lamented.

 

A problem emerges, Biden insists he would have to be a mind reader to have seen the problem coming, he promises it will be solved soon, eventually some half-measures get started, and then he and his team forget about it and move on to the next problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.