President Joe Biden’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week since the presidential debate is getting worse.
As if the open panic among Democratic politicians and pundits about Biden’s disastrous performance Thursday weren’t enough, polling results leaked Tuesday to the digital news outlet Puck show he has done more than lose ground in swing states.
Now, even states considered Democratic strongholds are in play, according to a memo from a polling firm influential in Democratic circles.
The memo, reported by veteran political journalist and former CNN correspondent Peter Hamby, came from the progressive polling group OpenLabs.
The nonprofit OpenLabs “conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign,” Hamby wrote.
But its news about polling in the 72 hours after the Atlanta debate could not have been comforting for the Biden team.
It found that 40 percent of voters who supported him in 2020 now think he should withdraw from this year’s race, Hamby wrote. An OpenLabs poll in May had that number at only 25 percent, according to Hamby.
Hamby offered a caveat about the results but also noted that OpenLabs carries weight among Democratic strategists.
“This is, of course, only a single poll, conducted during the initial aftershocks of the debate. It will take a few weeks to determine if Biden’s slippage in the polls is a trend and not a blip,” he wrote. “But given their reputation inside the party and connections to Future Forward, OpenLabs is a firm that Democratic campaigns take seriously.”
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The poll found Biden’s support in the swing states that will decide the November election badly dented by the debate.
“In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate,” Hamby wrote. “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.”
By itself, that points to disaster for Democrats, but data Hamby reported about states that might have been thought to be safely in the blue column should have even Jill Biden paying attention.
“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,” Hamby wrote.
“Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico” — actually, it looks like the OpenLabs poll has Biden DOWN by a fraction of a point in NM and VA. @PeterHamby pic.twitter.com/jjhDY2cHQz
— Jared Walczak (@JaredWalczak) July 2, 2024
All of that is likely to only increase the clamor among some Democrats to find a way to get Biden to withdraw from the race and for the party to find a new standard-bearer to battle the presumptive GOP nominee, former President Donald Trump.
In the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s debate, even the reliably left-leaning talking heads on CNN and MSNBC were rattled by Biden’s performance.
In the days since, even the most left-leaning establishment media outlets have been forced to cover Democratic unease about the president going into November.
And Tuesday, Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett became the first congressional Democrat to declare that Biden should follow the example set by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and withdraw from the race.
Texas is solidly red, of course, and Doggett’s words weren’t likely to change anything about the outcome in the Lone Star State.
But Virginia, Maine, Minnesota and New Mexico are a different story. For Democrats, losing in those states would be like reliving the nightmare of Republican Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984. (For most American voters, clearly, that wasn’t a nightmare at all.)
If those states are as competitive as the leaked memo indicates, for Biden’s team and Democrats in general, there is nothing good about that.
