Polls and pundits be damned. They’ve gotten it wrong too often.
That’s the position President Joe Biden has dug in on despite a rash of recent polls that showed him trailing former President Donald Trump in several key swing states and a majority of Americans who say he’s they’re not very or not at all confident in Biden’s mental capability to serve a second term.
Biden sat down with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos to make his pitch and here’s what he had to say:
“Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” He flashed a tense smile. “And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there.” He let that sink in for an instant and said, “In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”
Were people initially bullish on his first run in the Democratic primary back in 2020? No. Did pundits in particular predict a red wave in the 2022 mid-term elections that never materialized? Yes.
But there’s a flaw in his argument, particularly with the mid-term elections.
To be clear, polls don’t predict the future. They function to show people what people are thinking at the moment. With that caveat out of the way, non-partisan polls didn’t predict a red wave in 2022. It was the Republican partisan polls that showed a wave and less independent polling that had pundits and media conflating the mood of the country. (Vox’s Nicole Narea gave a more in-depth take on why “the media fell for a false ‘red wave’ narrative back in 2022.)
And that brings us to Biden’s polling woes of the present.
According to a recent poll by The Associated Press, 6 in 10 Americans, 63%, aren’t confident about Biden’s mental capacity compared to 57% who said the same for Trump. And in a harsher blow to Biden, independents are much more likely to say that they lack confidence in his mental abilities, 80%, compared with Trump’s 56%.
A recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll had equally alarming news for the incumbent president: Trump outpaces Biden in support in seven critical states that will likely decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin. According to the poll, 48% of voters said they would back Trump, and 43% would back Biden across all seven states.
Just as polls aren’t crystal balls, elected officials’ oft use of revisionist history isn’t ironclad.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.