Can Biden Possibly Recover?
Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter discusses what the polls tell us about his — and Kamala Harris’s — prospects.
As President Biden tries to stem a growing rebellion in his own party, both his supporters and detractors are closely watching the polls. Biden was already narrowly losing to Donald Trump in most surveys before his catastrophic debate two weeks ago, and polls since then have largely shown further erosion — though milder than some expected. But is Biden now in too deep a hole to realistically stage a comeback? I spoke with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, about whether the president can turn things around, why Democratic senators are consistently outperforming him, and whether Kamala Harris is a better match against Trump.
On Wednesday, Cook Political Report moved six states, including Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, toward Trump in your Electoral College ratings. Polling has been bad for Biden since the debate, but there still haven’t been a ton of high-quality ones and few surveys of key swing states that will decide this election. Were your ratings changes based mostly on numbers alone? Or is it more your evaluation of Biden’s overall weakness and the trajectory of this race?
I think the latter is the correct way to think about it. What I wrote in my piece is if you look at where the race was in those Electoral College battleground states before the debate, it was pretty clear that Biden was struggling in the Sunbelt, and there was a lot of talk that Biden’s only path was through the Midwest. But we kept the Sunbelt states as toss-ups because we hadn’t seen a real engagement of the campaign yet. And that was clearly what the Biden campaign’s message has been all along: “Well, just wait until we engage. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll see.”
“Watch me,” as Biden would say.
What we watched was obviously a disastrous debate. So if the best-case scenario is he stays where he is, that means he’s still down, and outside the margin of error in all those states that we moved from toss-up to lean Republican. And if we look at the national polling that has been out since the election, you don’t see that much movement, but it’s movement away from Biden and a little bit toward Trump. It’s basically a two-point shift in Trump’s favor. The way I continue to think about it is — tell me how you doing worse is going to help things get better in places where you were already losing.
But what is the path for improving these numbers in the coming weeks, especially if the campaign is never quite going to get into full gear? I assume that question influences your thinking here.
The path forward, if Biden is the nominee, is that he continues to try to find ways to shift the campaign focus away from his age and his performance and onto Donald Trump. I do think that part of the reason Biden’s approval ratings are as low as they are, even before the debate, is that some of the issues about his age are baked in. In other words, I do think that it’s not just about inflation and the border. It is that you have people saying, “I think he’s too old for this job.” Now, plenty of those people have also said, “I think he’s too old, but I’m still voting for him.” And that’s why you get the difference between how he could have a 36 percent job-approval rating but be getting 45 percent of the vote.
The question now in my mind is how many of those people who said, “He’s too old, but I’m still voting for him,” are now like, “Oh, it’s worse than I thought, and now I’m going to vote for Trump,” and how many of them are saying, “I’ve changed my mind, I can’t vote for either of them.”
So what’s his challenge going forward to get this race back on track? It’s been the same game plan from day one, which is that this can’t be a referendum on Joe Biden. It has to be a choice. And how do you get it back to being a choice? The best-case scenario is that the media frenzy around Biden’s health and stamina — the parsing of every sentence and looking for every example of a verbal or physical slip — fades by the time we get to the fall. He doesn’t have any other moments that look like the debate. And Trump, instead of trying to win over the people who dislike both candidates or who are worried about Biden but are still unclear about Trump, spends the next three months pushing them away with red-meat rhetoric and behavior. But what’s been done has been done. Not just his performance on the debate stage, but also the reaction from Democrats. Just play those ads in your head — of Michael Bennet the other night, even of George Clooney.
When you lose Clooney, you lose America. You also were tweeting recently about one of Biden’s other challenges here, which is voter apathy and enthusiasm. You wrote, “My guess is that post debate, the double haters and undecideds remain unconvinced that either candidate is worth supporting.”
We unveiled a new tool on our website called, very sexily, the Biden versus Trump National Polling Average. What makes it different, I think, from some of the others is the folks on our team broke out different demographic groups. And if you look at where things were in June, before the debate — I just picked a random date, June 24. Trump was getting 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, and Biden was 48 percent, which is already bad. He needs to do much better. Now, it’s 46-41. In other words, it’s not like the bottom dropped out. This is my just fundamental point overall, which is you took a bad situation and you made it just a little bit worse. And so, you’re only winning young people by five points. It doesn’t mean that’s ultimately what it’s going to end up looking like, but that Trump didn’t gain votes with younger people, and Biden keeps losing that. And that’s the enthusiasm problem. The bigger movement seems to be among independents, and they’ve moved away from Biden and a little bit toward Trump.
If Biden steps down, we’re obviously talking about an unknown world. But we do limited polling of head-to-head mash-ups of people who aren’t Biden against Trump over the last few months. And I’ve noticed that in many of them, the alternative candidates — Kamala Harris, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, the usual suspects of people who might replace him — all do about the same as Biden does against Trump, which is to say they tend to lose by a couple of points or more. Is this mostly a product of name recognition? Can we tell anything from a poll showing Whitmer down ten to Trump, when a lot of America doesn’t know who she is?
Probably not. I think the only one that really would be valuable to look at is Harris, because she is a known quantity. And we have very limited data even on Harris, because you can go back and you can look at maybe matchups from two months ago or a year ago between Harris and Trump, and that’s not going to tell you where it is right now. But my sense is that she starts off kind of where Biden was before the debate, which is to say running slightly behind, with the opportunity, theoretically, to change the focus of the campaign away from it being all about Biden to it at least being somewhat about Trump. She comes with all the same baggage on Biden in some ways. She’s part of the administration. So inflation, immigration, all of those things are pinned onto her, just as they were pinned onto Biden, so Trump’s overall message doesn’t need to change that much.
His message is that the last four years have been a disaster. “Do you really think that Kamala Harris, she was part of this administration, do you really think she’s going to fix the economy? Do you really think she’s going to fix immigration? Do you really think she’s going to solve crime?” So he doesn’t really have to change much about his campaign, and Harris doesn’t really either. She doesn’t have to deal with cognitive and physical questions, but she will have to turn into being able to prosecute the case against Trump.
It sounds like you think Harris is likely a stronger option now.
It’s a risk, obviously. We’ve never seen anything like this in modern times. But if you’re asking which is the bigger risk …
They’re both risks.
That’s right. And, look, they’ll pull out clips of Kamala Harris flubbing and doing word salad and everything too. There’s no doubt about that. But it’s more of can she at least make the case, as Biden has said — we just need to stop talking about this, and move on, and start talking about Trump. And it would seem that she is the one person who could do that. He cannot.
Biden has struggled to maintain his 2020 levels of support among Black and Hispanic voters in many polls. Do you think Kamala Harris could make up some of the shortfalls in those areas?
I think that is the 50 gajillion-dollar question that all of us would like to know. CNN is the only outlet that I’ve seen since the debate to ask about her specifically as a candidate.
I feel like we’re about to get a flood of those polls …
Oh, 100 percent. So you’re going to write this, and then —
I’ve got to get it up quickly, or it’ll be out of date.
Over the weekend, you’ll have 25 polls coming out. But what I remember of the CNN poll is that she was doing better among independent voters and she was doing better among women. So that alone is helpful. And I think the theory of the case with Harris is you’re also giving those younger voters who are frustrated a chance to vote for somebody that — they may not know much about her, but they can actually hear her message. Right now, when they see Biden, no matter what he’s saying, I don’t think it’s resonating.
One of the signature dynamics of this race has been that in competitive states, Biden is almost always doing worse than Democratic senators and candidates. So people like Bob Casey or Mark Kelly are up in their races by a few points, and Biden is down in those states by a few points. But as we established, it’s not obvious that Harris or others would do so much better against Trump. So do these splits reflect Biden’s particular weakness as a candidate? Or is it more that Trump is actually a stronger candidate than people give him credit for? He’s been underestimated again and again over the years.
The most dramatic pre-debate difference in polls comparing the presidential and down-ballot candidates was how much Democrats were overperforming Biden in terms of the vote percentage they were getting. The difference between Tammy Baldwin, say, getting 49 percent right now on the ballot and Biden getting 45 or 46 percent is important, obviously — two to three points is the difference between winning and losing. But that’s not a huge gap. The huge gap is between Trump getting 49 percent and the Republican at 39 percent. I think part of the reason those candidates are at 39 percent is that people don’t really know who they are. They’re all pretty unknown at this stage of the game. And Baldwin, Bob Casey, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, Jacky Rosen from Nevada — they’re all incumbents. Many of them have been incumbents for a long time.
Pre-debate, the Democratic candidates were basically getting the core vote that you should get if you’re a decent Democratic candidate. The percent of the vote you should be getting, even if you lose: 47, 48 percent. Again, pre-debate, the theory was that Biden just needed to get those people who already want to vote for a Democrat to come vote for him. It can’t be that hard. But now, if you are those Democratic candidates, your job is to make sure people don’t align you with the president. They always have been trying to be seen as independent from Biden, but even more so now. They’re saying, “You can feel free to vote for me. And I don’t really care what you’re doing on the top of the ticket. Just vote for me.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.