Tipsheet

Leaked Dem Internal Polling Is Absolutely Brutal for Biden

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 02, 2024 5:30 PM

The Biden White House wants to move on from last Thursday night’s disastrous debate. Still, the American electorate and the Democratic donor base refuse to let it slide for a simple reason: Joe Biden was a total trainwreck. To boot, the Biden operation has yet to accept or listen to concerns from the party’s biggest supporters, instead opting to go full ‘Baghdad Bob’ by giving a full-throated defense of the president’s health.

It's a tall order, given that three-fourths of the country thinks Biden is too old to be president. Pre-debate, 65 percent had those sentiments; they’re now 72 percent. These are unwinnable numbers, with more than a few top Democrats relaying concerns that Biden is in losing territory and could find himself permanently there come November. 

More bad news: OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit polling and messaging firm, drafted a memo on the fallout for Biden post-debate. As you expect, it was downright brutal, with the president suffering a massive slide in every key battleground state. Forty percent of his 2020 supporters think he should drop out, according to Puck News. The leaked memo also included a survey, which the outlet noted rightly probably irritated the Biden team, polled how replacement Democratic candidates would do in the battleground states—they all did better: 

The poll—conducted online in the 72 hours after the debate and emailed to interested parties on Sunday—found that 40 percent of the Biden voters in 2020 that were surveyed now believe the president should end his campaign. That represents a significant shift from their last survey in May, which showed that only a quarter of Biden 2020 voters said he should drop out. Biden is also taking a major hit among swing voters: By a 2-to-1 margin, they believe Biden should exit the race. 

[…] 

The poll found that Biden has dropped only slightly in the national horse race against Trump, by .08 points. That mostly squares with the public narrative from the Biden campaign in the wake of the debate, as their team has labored to calm Democratic panic over Biden’s ability to beat Trump in November. Geoff Garin, one of Biden’s top pollsters, tweeted over the weekend that the campaign’s internal polling showed that the national race was mostly unchanged. “The debate had no effect on the vote choice,” he said. “The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today.” Polls conducted immediately after the debate by CNN and FiveThirtyEight suggested similarly negligible gains for Trump nationally, with CNN reporting that “just 5 percent of respondents say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.” 

But according to OpenLabs, that’s only part of the story. While the debate may have barely registered in national data, in their surveys of key Electoral College states where voters are paying closer attention to the campaign, Biden is doing noticeably worse. In a poll including third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president has fallen by around 2 points in every single core battleground—and also in states that were not even on the 2024 map last week. In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate. He has also dropped in Michigan, where he now trails Trump by 7. OpenLabs also found that he is now losing by roughly 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and by almost 9 points in Nevada.

The most worrisome angle to all this is that Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren’t considered campaign battlegrounds last week. Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico—and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points. 

The survey also found that Biden is now losing in New Hampshire, news that aligns with a Saint Anselm College poll released Monday showing Trump suddenly winning the Granite State. 

[…] 

OpenLabs—surely to the disappointment of the White House—also decided to test other possible Democratic replacements for Biden in matchups against Trump. The results were sobering. Harris, Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg all poll ahead of Biden in every battleground state. 

While Biden said he would remain in the race, due to Lady Macbeth Jill Biden and his son Hunter forcing him to do so, these figures will also keep the ‘replace Biden’ mantra alive among Democrats who are rightly crapping the bed over the president’s debate performance. There’s no level of preparation that can gloss over Joe’s stark mental decline. Biden had almost a week to prepare in seclusion at Camp David, resulting in a nightmare.

Even worse, every Democrat knows that Biden is cooked, but the White House and the campaign are still peddling the ‘he’s fine’ line, which isn’t working, nor is it believed.

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