What is the Biden White House Thinking About 2024?

An attempt to explain the cognitive dissonance about the upcoming election.

Photo by Suzy Brooks on Unsplash

As Joe Biden and Donald Trump have wrapped up their party nominations, the national polls continue to show a tight race — but one where Trump possesses an undeniable advantage in the battleground states. The latest data point supporting that previous sentence was the New York Times/Siena poll that came out over the weekend. It showed Trump leading in five out of six of those states — and leading by double digits in Georgia and Nevada. And after a brief moment when Biden was leading in the betting markets, Trump has pulled ahead again.

It is still May and not November — Election Day is six months away. And most of the polls for most of the battleground states are within the margin of error. Still, for those concerned about what Trump might do if elected president again, the poll numbers are disconcerting. When Nate Cohn is writing that, “a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition,” it is easy for those opposing Trump — like, you know, me — to start sweating.

You know who is not sweating? The Biden White House! In interviews earlier this year with the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, neither Biden nor his staff were worried about his mediocre poll numbers. Bruce Reed told Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.” Tom Donilon told Osnos, “[by November] the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.” Multiple Biden staffers questioned whether polling could still be useful given the pitiful response rates to polling queries.

That trend has continued unabated, this time in a piece by Axios’ Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson:

President Biden doesn't believe his bad poll numbers, and neither do many of his closest advisers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The dismissiveness of the poor polling is sincere, not public spin, according to Democrats who have spoken privately with the president and his team.

That bedrock belief has informed Biden's largely steady-as-she-goes campaign — even as many Democrats outside the White House are agitating for the campaign to change direction, given that Biden is polling well behind where he was four years ago.

The public polling simply doesn't reflect the president's support, they say.

In public and private, Biden has been telling anyone who will listen that he's gaining ground — and is probably up — on Donald Trump in their rematch from 2020.

“While the press doesn't write about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor, with the polls moving towards us and away from Trump,” Biden told donors during a West Coast swing last week.

A few days earlier, confronted with some of his bad poll numbers in a rare interview with CNN, Biden offered a more sweeping indictment of polling methodology.

“The polling data has been wrong all along. How many — you guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks you have to call to get one response?”

Nichols and Thompson go on to note that Biden liked the PBS/Marist poll from a few weeks ago that had him with a lead.

Beyond the Trumpish tendency for Biden to latch on to positive polls and discount less favorable ones, it is worth asking whether the Biden White House is in denial or whether they are seeing something that pundits and pollsters are not.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks the answer lies somewhere in between.