President Joe Biden has insisted that he can recover from his polling deficit, but historically, candidates who have been in his shoes have gone on to lose their elections.
Biden claimed in an interview with the BET network on Wednesday night that several other presidents who were behind in the polls managed to pull off a November victory. Polling experts who spoke to The Daily Caller News Foundation said Biden’s optimism ignores one inconvenient fact: His low approval ratings.
“While someone may have come back from a two- or three-point deficit, no incumbent has recovered from the low approval numbers at this stage of the campaign,” Jon McHenry, a GOP polling analyst and vice president at North Star Opinion Research, told the DCNF.
Biden said in his BET interview that “presidents who have won at this stage of the game — the last seven or eight presidents — five of them were losing at this time by significant margins.”
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However, of the last 15 presidential races that featured incumbents, only two former presidents (George W. Bush in 2004 and Harry Truman in 1948) ultimately won after trailing at this point in their campaigns.
Even among first-time nominees, most of the past eight candidates who were polling ahead at this stage won the presidency, with the exceptions of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
“This isn’t Bill Clinton down two points,” McHenry told the DCNF. “This isn’t Barack Obama down two points. This is an 81-year-old man who’s showing significant signs of wear and tear, down several points nationally, and by mid- to upper single digits in a lot of the swing states he would need to win.”
Over the past few months, Biden’s approval rating has stayed below 40 percent while his disapproval rating has soared above 50 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight projections. Biden’s disapproval rating has exceeded his approval since September 2021.
Will Biden’s polling continue to drop?
“There’s nobody who’s been as underwater as he is now, with their job approval, who’s ever been able to come back and win,” Charles Bullock, the Richard B. Russell chair in political science and professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia, told the DCNF.
Biden’s standing is cause for alarm for Democrats, as he trails former President Donald Trump in seven battleground states, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages. Trump is even narrowing in on Biden’s lead in states like New York, New Mexico, Minnesota and Virginia where Democrats have comfortably won for decades.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m only down two or three points nationally,’ but elections aren’t decided nationally, they’re decided state by state,” McHenry told the DCNF. “And he’s trailing by significant margins in all the swing states at this point.”
Only two other candidates in the past 15 election cycles who were doing worse than Biden at this stage managed to win their elections. In 1988, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was losing to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, before going on to win his election. Similarly, Republican nominee and now-former President Richard Nixon was trailing his Democratic challenger Hubert Humphrey but was able to pull off the victory in 1968.
“It is technically possible and extremely unlikely,” McHenry told the DCNF. “Frankly, I don’t think he is in a position where he can recover. He is not strong enough physically or mentally to make the case for himself.”
Speculation about Biden’s cognitive health has surrounded his presidency and his campaign, but it came to a head following his poor performance during the first presidential debate on June 27. The day after Trump and Biden took to the debate stage, 60 percent of voters and even 40 percent of Democrats said the president should be replaced as the Democratic nominee, according to a Morning Consult poll from June 28.
“Democrats who are running in toss-up states are running well ahead of him,” Bullock told the DCNF. “So it’s not that it’s a problem necessarily with the rejection of the Democratic Party. It’s much more personal. It’s concerns about Joe Biden. Three weeks ago, he had a chance to allay some of these concerns, and instead of allaying them, he simply reinforced them.”
Since the debate, over 25 House Democrats and four Democratic senators have called for Biden to drop out amid growing concerns that he will drag the party from the top of the ticket.
“It feels like the discussion has gone from ‘will they replace Joe Biden’ to ‘when will they replace Joe Biden?’” McHenry told the DCNF. “That doesn’t mean they absolutely will, but it feels more and more that he is going to get replaced.”
Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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