Don’t believe the mainstream media and the shaky science of the polling industry, the president’s ally told supporters. It’s still early — the “real campaign” won’t even begin until August — and the same people convinced by public opinion surveys today were the ones, back in 2016, “touting Hillary Clinton and predicting Trump would be … taking the Republicans down to defeat.”
That ally was former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, writing in 2020 to chide “analyst after analyst” looking at the present data and trying to make supporters of Donald Trump “panic or collapse in despair.” They were wrong before, he argued, and “are simply following the same wrong patterns” today.
It’s once more the 2016 election all over again, at least the way some close to the current occupant of the White House see it. The Democratic establishment is making the same mistake it made nearly a decade ago, the narrative goes, when party elders, up to and including Barack Obama, discouraged Joe Biden from running for president and handed the country to an enemy of the U.S. Constitution. What makes it worse today is that Obama is joined in his short-sighted treachery by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., reportedly busy “working the phones” to get Biden out of the race, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who reportedly told Biden to his face that he ought to step aside.
Here we go again, a source close to Biden told NBC News Thursday night.
“Can we all just remember for a minute that these same people who are trying to push Joe Biden out are the same people who literally gave us all Donald Trump? In 2015, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer pushed Biden aside in favor of Hillary; they were wrong then, and they are wrong now,” the Biden ally said, arguing that one of the lessons of 2016 is that “polls are BS.”
A softened version of that argument was made Friday morning by Biden’s 2024 campaign director, Jen O’Malley Dillon. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” she brushed off reports that Biden, currently isolating at his beach home in Delaware as he recovers from COVID-19, is now more receptive to calls that he step aside and pass the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Absolutely the president’s in this race,” she assured viewers. “Yes he’s old, but he can do the job and he can win.”
And what about all the polls that suggest he won’t? While not dismissing them outright, O’Malley Dillon suggested looking back at the last midterm elections and the Republican “red wave” that never materialized.
“We had extraordinary elections in 2022, despite what the polling was saying at this point as well,” she said.
If the Biden campaign truly believes that, it’s as much a cause for alarm as the president’s confused debate performance. At this point in the race, it was Republicans predicting a “red wave,” not the polls: the GOP enjoyed just a 1.7% lead over Democrats on July 19, 2022, based on the 538 average of surveys that asked voters which party they wanted to control Congress. In November of that year, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives went on to win the popular vote by 2.8%.
If there’s a lesson from 2022 it’s this: that historical precedent — the opposition party always making huge gains in a midterm; the incumbent president almost always winning reelection — may not tell us much about politics in 2024.
As for 2016, at this point in the race the 538 average had Hillary Clinton up 2.7% on her opponent; after being hit by “her emails,” a Russian hack of the DNC and an election-eve letter from FBI Director James Comey suggesting she was a crook, Ciinton won the popular vote by 2.1% but lost the race.
There may well be reason for skepticism of polling, which in 2024 suggests an historic number of voters might split their tickets — backing a Democrat for Senate but not the presidency — and that Trump is now far more popular with young voters of color, but the lesson of 2016 and 2022 is not that they should be ignored.
Few outside Biden’s inner circle appears to be buying the spin on those elections, with nearly two-thirds of rank-and-file Democratic voters now saying they want another candidate. It’s possible the president himself no longer buys it either.
“We’re close to the end,” another source close to Biden told NBC News on Thursday, echoing what Pelosi has reportedly been telling other House Democrats: that the president may exit the race as soon as this weekend. Other sources told The New York Times the same thing, while cautioning that no formal decision has been made.
The Biden campaign is publicly denying that. A campaign email sent Friday morning asserted that there was no alternative to staying the course: “In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee.”
But out of public view, CNN reported Thursday night, even “many senior-most officials inside the White House and the Biden campaign privately believe at this point that the president does need to drop out.”
In private, too, is where many Democrats have been making their argument that Biden should step aside. That they are being made public now is a sign that those who made them believe their private nudges need some teeth if the current drama is ever to come to a close.
One of those entreaties, made public Thursday, came from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who helped lead the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection. In a four-page letter to the president, dated July 6, Raskin lauded Biden’s legislative accomplishments and credited him with saving democracy in 2020. But he also made an analogy to baseball — to a star pitcher who doesn’t want to leave the mound after a long outing, despite the data suggesting it’s time to go, and ultimately costs their team the game.
“There is no shame in taking a well-deserved bow to the overflowing appreciation of the crowd when your arm is tired out,” Raskin wrote, “and there is real danger for the team in ignoring the statistics.”
