Democrats Just Won Big. So Why Do Polls Show Biden Getting Clobbered?

Tuesday night, Democrats once again defied the worsening unpopularity of President Joe Biden by winning or dramatically exceeding expectations in nearly every single election of significance across the country. In doing so, they provided a pretty definitive answer to the question of which is more important to voters today: Biden’s woes or the ongoing backlash against GOP overreach on issues like abortion, trans rights, and free speech in public schools. But to reverse his slide in time to win reelection, Biden must directly address the sources of his struggles, including lingering dissatisfaction with inflation and high interest rates.

Democrats pulled off the near-total sweep of important elections just one day after a series of almost preposterously dire battleground state polls of the 2024 election were released by the New York Times in conjunction with gold-standard pollster Siena College. How big of a night was it for Team Blue? Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear easily fended off his Republican challenger Daniel Cameron in a state Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020, while Virginia Democrats clawed back the state House of Delegates from Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Republican allies and held on to the state Senate, rendering the governor’s hateful agenda a dead letter. The Ohio referendum to inscribe reproductive rights into the state constitution passed by 13 points, a hugely consequential victory for Ohioans and activists working to fight reproductive tyranny.

New Jersey Democrats, fresh off embarrassing performances in 2021 and 2022, expanded their state legislative majorities, while in Pennsylvania they won an important state Supreme Court seat that maintains the party’s 5–2 edge on the court heading into what is sure to be a lawsuit-rich environment in the presidential election year. Elsewhere in that critical toss-up state, Democrats in the suburban Central Bucks School District swept away a slate of GOP cultural warriors on the school board, whose divisive anti-trans, anti-speech antics had needlessly polarized the community. In suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, Democrats held all 12 seats on the school board against Republican insurgents aligned with Youngkin’s moral panic. Same deal in Colorado. The Republican war on teachers and schools had a really, really rough night.

So then—what’s up with Biden’s grisly polling? Is Biden still about to get clobbered next year?

There’s no other way to put this: Tuesday’s results were virtually impossible to reconcile with the grim national environment painted by the steady drip of negative polling for the president. It is difficult to believe, for example, that Pennsylvanians who are so fed up with the White House that they are ready to give Donald Trump a margin of 4 points in the state, according to the New York Times/Siena poll, woke up Tuesday and decided to elect a Democrat to a state Supreme Court seat in a cakewalk. Not only that, but the party has been crushing it in special elections all year. Prior to election night, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich ran the numbers and found that Democrats have overperformed partisan baselines by 11 points across 30 (mostly state legislative) special elections since the new year. So far, that represents the biggest special election overperformance of the century, a number that has been fairly predictive in the past.

The disjuncture between strong Democratic election performances since 2021 and the reality of Biden’s dismal public approval and horserace numbers raises two very difficult questions. The first is whether Democrats are or are not slipping with key coalition groups like young people and voters of color, which would without question doom them to an apocalyptic night next November. And the second, perhaps more unknowable question is if it is Joe Biden himself who is the problem and whether swapping him out for a different Democrat would put the party in a towering position for a sweeping win in 2024.

Not every pollster makes their crosstabs—the demographic details of who was polled—available. But those that do are offering a somewhat implausible picture of the 2024 electorate. In the NYT/Siena polls of six battleground states that sent shockwaves through liberal circles on Monday, Biden led Trump by just 1 point among 18- to 29-year-olds, with Trump winning 22 percent of Black and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. In Tuesday’s national CNN poll, Trump actually leads with voters under 35 and pulls 23 percent of Black and 46 percent of Hispanic voters, continuing a trend that includes the shocking Washington Post/ABC News poll in September that showed Trump leading Biden nationally by 10 points. For context, according to the 2020 exit polls, Biden won 18- to 29-year-olds by 24, Black voters by 75, and Latino voters by 33 points. Those margins were virtually unchanged in a much more Republican-leaning environment last year.

Is it possible that young voters, voters of color, and various other Democratic-leaning or dominated subgroups have undergone some kind of massive ideological transformation in the 12 months since the 2022 midterm elections? Sure—but it is highly improbable. What is more likely is that there is a systematic lack of enthusiasm for Biden among stalwart Democrats, and that ambivalence will dissipate as Election Day draws nearer. Biden may also be suffering from what pollsters call “partisan nonresponse bias”: the tendency of supporters not to answer the phone or respond to surveys when negative stories about their candidate are in the news.

Yet unlike in 2022, this isn’t a media narrative driven by a handful of flood-the-zone hack partisan pollsters. The survey outfits recently showing Biden trailing Trump and other potential GOP candidates include not just CNN and the New York Times, but Marquette Law School, the Washington Post/ABC, and Quinnipiac. If anything, these are organizations that have generally had a Democratic lean when comparing outcomes to final polls. So if there is a systematic bias out there against Democrats and Biden, it is one that is shared by nearly all reputable pollsters.

Nor is this a case of being so far from Election Day that polling is immaterial. At this point in 2019, Biden led Trump by 10.2 points in the RealClearPolitics average, close to the 7.5 point margin heading into Election Day. On Nov. 8, 2015, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 2.2 points, and eventually bested him by 2.1 percentage points in the national popular vote. Mitt Romney trailed Barack Obama by 1.7 points on Oct. 9, 2011, very close to the final polling average—although Obama did ultimately win by nearly 4 points. And on this day in 2007, Obama led John McCain by 3.8 points. Yes, Obama nearly doubled that margin the following Election Day, but it’s not like the polling a year out was completely out of whack. If not for the worsening economic crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, McCain might have made it much closer.

One key piece of evidence for the Dump Biden crowd is buried deep in the NYT/Siena polls. Battleground state voters were asked about Biden but also about a “generic Democrat.” Biden trailed Trump by 5 points, but a nameless Democrat holds an 8-point lead on the 45^th president. Would swapping Biden out for someone like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer solve this problem and give Democrats their long-awaited and hoped-for total repudiation of Trumpism, or would that person have similar vulnerabilities after a year in the polarizing meat grinder of American national politics? No one knows.

Tuesday’s Democratic romp proved that the fierce backlash to Dobbs is an enduring problem for Republicans, and that the GOP’s fixation on inflexible abortion bans, teacher-bashing, and trans-baiting is an electoral loser for them. But Biden’s unmistakable slide in the polls means that Democrats shouldn’t stand pat and assume that they will coast to big wins next year. Issue polling makes it clear that voters trust and prefer Republicans on the economy. And despite the clever Bidenomics branding, the public is not sold on Biden’s economic performance. On the contrary, despite low unemployment and strong GDP growth, lingering dissatisfaction with price increases and high interest rates is putting voters in a sour mood that they currently seem inclined to take out on Biden.

Some of the president’s challenges are unaddressable. Short of pre-recording all of his appearances with the kind of de-aging technology that Martin Scorsese used to make Robert De Niro a young man in The Irishman, there’s little Biden can do about the fact that so many people think he’s too old and not up for the job. Tacking to the left on Israel-Palestine is only going to alienate an equal if not larger number of voters than those who are disgusted by the U.S.-backed carnage in Gaza. Nor will turning to hard-line rhetoric stem the harm that immigration may be causing the president, another issue where voters currently say they prefer the draconian policies of Trump.

Similarly, Biden can’t bring 2019 prices back nor, any economist would tell you, would he want to, since deflation is widely regarded as a potential catastrophe. But that doesn’t mean he can’t do anything about a crucial reason so many voters seem mad at him.

He could use the bully pulpit to assail corporate price-gouging and profit-hoarding, as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have done, to tap into the genuine pain that people are feeling from higher costs, particularly seniors who have seen the relative value of their nest eggs plummet over the past three years. Relatedly, Biden must start loudly leaning on the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates, since inflation finally seems to be under control. He could even take the fight directly to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as Trump once did and promise to fire him if interest rates don’t come down before the election. That would be no mere political gimmick; anyone looking to buy a house (or even sell one they already own) or a car right now is facing their toughest predicament in more than a decade, as high interest rates put big, important purchases out of reach for millions.

Together that rhetoric would allow Biden to tout the very real gains of the post-pandemic economy while also acknowledging and responding to voters’ frustrations with lingering problems. It could also help keep the focus on reproductive rights, democracy, and Trump’s utterly terrifying and vengeful plans for a second term, which voters are going to like less and less the more they hear about them. Tuesday night proved that when push comes to shove, voters want to pick their rights, their democracy, and their futures over whatever frustrations they might be feeling with Biden. And if he refuses to get out of the way to make room for a younger, more electrifying Democrat, it is on him to do the hard work of finding the right message to avoid a loss to Donald Trump next year that the country can ill afford.