There have been so many bad polls for President Biden that his playbook for them is now worn out.
First, dismiss the polling industry as inherently broken. Next, discuss metrics. Finally, remind supporters how many months remain until Election Day and highlight the structural and financial advantages the Biden campaign has created while former President Donald J. Trump sits on trial.
Over the weekend before Monday, the New York Times, Siena College and Philadelphia Inquirer poll showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden in five of the six battleground states surveyed. Mr. Biden traveled to the West Coast. In conversations with donors in San Francisco and the Seattle area, he argued that they should ignore the survey — especially when things look bad for him.
“People are engaged, no matter what the polling data says,” Mr. Biden said Friday in Seattle. “It’s terribly difficult to judge the polls these days because they’re so difficult to answer.”
The Biden campaign released a statement Monday from Geoff Garin, one of its pollsters, in which he dismissed the new poll’s results.
“It is a mistake to draw sweeping conclusions about the race based on the results of a single poll,” Garin said. “The reality is that many voters are not paying much attention to the election and have not yet made up their minds – a dynamic that is also reflected in today’s poll. These voters will decide this election, and only the Biden campaign can win them.”
The president’s comments suggest that his internal polling data is consistent with that of the Times and Siena College, which have found a significant gap between registered and likely voters.
“In the polling data, we are the strongest among likely voters,” he told supporters at a campaign fundraiser Saturday in Medina, Washington, an upscale suburb of Seattle. “That’s a good sign. And while the national polls have basically seen our registered voters go up by four, we’re probably up in voters by more.”
And then there is Mr. Biden’s campaign, which has opened 150 offices with more than 500 employees in battleground states. The goal of these operatives, along with an advertising campaign expected to cost $2 billion by the end of this cycle, is to turn November’s election into a referendum not on Mr. Biden but on his predecessor by appealing to voters Mr. Trump recalls report on abortion and democracy.
Part of Mr. Biden’s problem, his aides and advisers have said for nearly a year, is that too many voters have forgotten the most alarming parts of the Trump years. Mr Biden’s campaign aides – and the president himself – have gone to great lengths to highlight Mr Trump’s role in restricting abortion rights and his public statements on democracy and health care.
“Trump is trying to make the country forget how dark and troubling things were when he was president,” Mr. Biden said at the fundraiser in Seattle. “But we will never forget it.”
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2024-05-13 15:14:41
www.nytimes.com
