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President Joe Biden tends to deliver his most unvarnished attacks on his political adversaries 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 fixture of the 2024 race: public polling data.
“I don’t think any of the polls matter this early around because it’s hard to get a good poll these days,” Biden told campaign donors in Chicago last month.
At another one in Atlanta, the president cautioned, “It’s harder to make any poll rational these days.”
His critiques of public polling data are as frequent — coming up in at least ten of his fundraisers since May 1 — as they are technical, delving into the mechanics that he says might be presenting flawed results.
“You have to make — I don’t know what it is — 36, 40 calls to get one person to respond. Hardly anybody has hard lines anymore,” Biden said before an audience of 3,000 at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles last weekend.
“You’re blaming caller ID for this?” late night host Jimmy Kimmel teased the president in response.
Biden’s criticism of polling coincides with data persistently showing a razor close race between him and Trump, and the former president leading in some key battleground states. Such polls, as well as those outlining voter concerns about his age or his handling of the economy, have fueled Democrats’ nerves about the president’s re-election prospects. As the November election has gotten closer, Biden has tried to ease their anxiety by addressing them head on.
The president’s advisers don’t dispute the race is close, and believe it will remain that way through Election Day. Biden’s team also regularly conducts its own polling that’s more intensive and expensive than most public polls, and offers a deeper look at how voters are feeling, which informs the president’s view of the race because it’s part of his regular, detailed campaign briefings.
Biden aides also say it’s no accident that he makes most of his unprompted public commentary about polls in front his campaign’s financial supporters, as they are among those most concerned about the numbers.
His comments take on various forms, but each one seems trained on the same goal: excusing or explaining away a less than ideal standing ahead of the November election.
The president dives into the weeds of polling methodology, as he did at the fundraisers in Chicago, Atlanta and near Seattle. He offers his own analysis of the state of play for donors — “We run strongest among likely voters in the polling data. That’s a good sign,” Biden told donors last month. “While the national polls basically have us registered voters up by four, likely voters we’re up by more.”
He blames the media’s presentation of the data. “While the press doesn’t write about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor,” Biden said at a fundraiser in New York in April. “Polls are moving towards us and away from Trump.” At another recent fundraiser, Biden said pundits have “been wrong about everything so far in the polling,” pointing to Democrats’ strong showing in the 2022 midterms.
“If you look at the actual votes in primaries, as opposed to the polls, we’re running much stronger than Mr. Trump is,” Biden told supporters at another fundraiser last month.
When reporters have asked Biden about his poll numbers, his responses have ranged from dismissive to annoyed. “Read the polls, Jack,” he snapped at one reporter seeking his reaction to polls showing many Democrats didn’t want him to seek re-election.
There are times when he’s said he doesn’t read the polls. “This is a process, and it’s going to be up and down,” Biden said at a news conference during his first year in office. “That’s why I don’t look at the polls.”
In other instances, the president has gone into painstaking detail that suggests otherwise.
“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 New York fundraiser, referring to Trump.
Biden campaign aides have had to spend so much time answering to public polling data that they’ve adopted the adage, “Polls don’t vote, voters vote.”
Asked about the president’s approach to polls, the Biden campaign’s 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 distract us from what we know we need to be focused on as a campaign to reach the voters who are going to decide the election.”
The president’s aides nonetheless hope that his performance next week at the first 2024 general election presidential debate gives Biden a boost in the polls, or at least diminishes Trump’s standing. And Biden allies this week latched onto a poll that showed promising signs for the president.
“I share this only because I spend 70% of my time giving pep talks to nervous supporters,” 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.
One Biden campaign pollster said in polling briefings the president is less interested in the head-to-head matchup 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 how those numbers are changing week to week.
“He takes the polling aggregate very seriously but is not someone who is going to wonder, ‘Are we plus one, are we minus one,’” the pollster said.
Biden’s consumption of polling data is a contrast to the 2020 campaign, when he didn’t like regular polling updates on the road, especially in the Democratic primaries, according to a former campaign official said. And until his campaign got an infusion of cash after his South Carolina primary win, Biden’s team couldn’t even afford to regularly poll voters, the official said.
A senior Biden campaign official said that while the president is now regularly briefed on polling, the metrics he mostly focuses on include how his campaign is engaging voters, such as how many offices are opening and the number of volunteers.
“That to us matters as an indicator that people are getting revved up, they’re getting on board, they’re paying attention to this campaign,” the official said.
Another pollster who has briefed the president on his campaign’s internal surveys said the most effective approach has been to pair the data with what voters are saying in focus groups or to campaign organizers. The pollster said Biden’s response to “harsh news” about his standing with voters has been, “We have to fix it.”
“He’s always taken the info and said, ‘Help me understand it,’” the pollster said.
