President Joe Biden tends to launch his most explicit attacks on political opponents at fundraisers away from the glare of television cameras. And one of his most frequent targets lately has been polling data, another fixture in the 2024 race, second only to former President Donald Trump.
“It’s hard to get good polls these days, so I don’t think any of the polls matter at this time of year,” Biden told campaign donors in Chicago last month.
At a separate poll in Atlanta, the president warned that “it’s hard to do a reasonable poll these days.”
His criticisms of the polling data are as frequent as they are technical, having featured at least 10 fundraisers since May 1 and digging into mechanisms that he says could be producing inaccurate results.
“You have to make 36, 40 calls to get one response. There are very few people who are willing to take a tough stance anymore,” Biden told a crowd of 3,000 at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles last weekend.
“Are you going to blame it on caller ID?” late-night host Jimmy Kimmel mocked the president.
Biden’s criticism of the polls comes as data continues to show a close race between him and Trump and that Biden has leads in some key battleground states. Those polls, and others highlighting voter concerns about Biden’s age and economic policies, have put Democrats on edge about the president’s reelection prospects. As the November election approaches, Biden has sought to ease their fears by addressing them head-on.
The president’s advisers agree that the race is close and believe it will remain so through Election Day. The Biden campaign also regularly conducts its own polling, which is more thorough and expensive than most polls, to provide a deeper look at voter sentiment. This has shaped the president’s views of the race and is part of his regular, detailed campaign briefings.
Biden aides also say it’s no coincidence that Biden has made most of his spontaneous public comments about polls in front of campaign donors, who are the people most concerned about the numbers.
His comments have taken different forms, but they all seem to serve the same purpose: to excuse or excuse a less-than-ideal position ahead of the November election.
The president went into the minutiae of polling methodology, as he did at fundraisers in Chicago, Atlanta and the Seattle area. As for where he stands with donors, Biden offered his own analysis. “The polling data shows that we have the strongest support among the electorate, which is a good sign,” Biden told donors last month. “National polls show that we’re basically four ahead of registered voters, but even ahead of the electorate.”
He has criticized the way the media presents the data. “The press won’t cover it, but the momentum is clearly in our favor,” Biden said at a New York fundraiser in April. “The polls are moving in our favor and away from Trump.” At another recent fundraiser, Biden said experts had “got every poll wrong so far,” pointing to Democrats performing well in the 2022 midterm elections.
“If you look at the actual vote count in the primaries, not the opinion polls, we are much stronger than Trump,” Biden told supporters at another fundraiser last month.
When reporters asked Biden about the poll numbers, his responses ranged from disdain to annoyance: “Read the polls, Jack,” Biden yelled at a reporter who asked his reaction to polls showing many Democrats do not want him re-elected.
Biden has also said he doesn’t look at polls. “It’s a process, and it’s going to have ups and downs,” he said at a news conference during his first year in office. “So I don’t look at polls.”
In other instances, the president has provided detailed explanations that suggest otherwise.
“Of the last 23 polls, we’ve had the lead 10, Trump has had the lead eight and we’ve been tied five,” Biden said of Trump at a fundraiser in New York.
Biden campaign staff had to spend so much time responding to polling data that they adopted the adage, “Polls don’t vote, voters vote.”
Asked about the president’s approach to the polls, Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement, “This campaign does not tolerate media over-reporting of the horse race, and polls that have no predictive value distract from our focus as a campaign reaching out to voters who will decide the outcome of this election.”
Still, the president’s advisers are hoping that Biden’s performance in the first 2024 presidential debate next week will boost his standing in the polls, or at least hurt Trump’s, and Biden’s supporters have focused on polls this week that have shown promising signs for the president.
“I’m sharing this because I spend 70% of my time encouraging anxious supporters,” Biden campaign finance chairman Rufus Giffords posted on X, linking to a new Fox News poll showing Biden leading Trump by 3 points.
Biden campaign pollsters said in a polling report that the president is more interested in what voters say on specific issues than in the head-to-head numbers against Trump, and that voters’ views of the race vary widely, so they’re particularly interested in how the numbers are changing from week to week.
“He takes the poll tallies very seriously, but he’s not one to think, ‘Is it plus one or minus one?'” the pollster said.
Biden’s use of polling data contrasts with his 2020 campaign, when he was unwilling to regularly update polls during the campaign, particularly in the Democratic primary, according to a former campaign official. And the Biden campaign couldn’t even afford to regularly survey voters until the campaign received an infusion of money after his South Carolina primary win, the official said.
A Biden campaign official said the president is now being regularly briefed on polling, but the metrics he focuses on most are how the campaign is engaging with voters, including how many offices it opens and how many volunteers it has.
“For us, this is an important indicator that people are enthusiastic, supportive and paying attention to this campaign,” the official said.
Another pollster, who briefed the president on the campaign’s internal research, said the most effective approach is to marry the data with what voters tell focus groups and campaign organizers. Biden’s response to the “hard news” about voter support was, “We’ve got to fix that,” the pollster said.
“Whenever he received information he would say, ‘Please help me understand it,'” the pollster said.
