Amid growing calls to withdraw from the presidential race, President Joe Biden insists he is still the best person to defeat Donald Trump. Asked on Thursday whether he would end his run if he decides he cannot defeat his Republican rival, Biden told ABC News it would take a message from the “Lord Almighty” to convince him.
Biden was trailing Trump in virtually every battleground state poll before his calamitous debate on June 27, and there are some indications his standing has worsened significantly since then.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, Biden said of his detractors, “They’re big names, but I don’t care what those big names think. They were wrong in 2020. They were wrong in 2022 about the red wave. They were wrong in 2024.”
What if Biden is right, though?
HuffPost spoke on Wednesday to Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for Blueprint, a Democratic public opinion initiative not aligned with any candidate or group, about whether there’s a plausible case for a Biden victory, despite all of the doubts. The interview followed Biden’s trip to Capitol Hill to impress upon House Democrats his continued commitment to running, and it preceded his Thursday evening press conference from the NATO summit in Washington.
Blueprint is funded by Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, whose top political adviser, Dmitri Mehlhorn , remains firmly in Biden’s corner. But Mehlhorn has no involvement in Blueprint’s operations, and the initiative’s only goal is defeating former President Trump, according to Smith, who also co-founded the New York City-based consulting firm Slingshot Strategies.
Below is a condensed and edited transcript of the interview.
Let’s say Biden not only locks up the nomination but also wins the election against Trump, effectively showing up the chorus of skeptics. How will he have pulled that off?
If we wake up on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and he’s won, I don’t actually think it’s the most complicated thing in the world to imagine how we will explain that.
Trump’s criminality and mania were baked into voter perceptions of him in such a way that the felony convictions didn’t move voters that much. Biden’s age and abilities are baked in in the minds of voters in such a way that the debate has moved polling a couple points ― just like the convictions moved polling points in the other direction ― but nothing too dramatic.
This election really is less about either of these two guys and much more about the material concerns of the voters. Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster, Blueprint
In the end, we still remain with two of the best known candidates to voters in American history. We have two candidates who have served as president ― whom voters feel they know intimately. There’s very little left to learn. This election really is less about either of these two guys and much more about the material concerns of the voters.
A winning campaign from Biden is likely one that remains laser-focused on the material concerns of the voters and what he can do for them.
What are the main “material” issues for voters – the things affecting their lives and finances in a concrete way?
All of our polling continues to show inflation and prices at the top of the charts, followed usually by immigration, which is a material concern. There’s fearmongering around it, but it’s undergirded by economic and security anxieties.
At a press conference Thursday, President Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to run for a second term despite growing calls from some Democrats for him to withdraw from the campaign.
Our polling has shown time and time again, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party has done all sorts of things that materially benefit voters, that test well and that voters are less familiar with . It’s things he’s done on price gouging, going to bat for working people, against pharmaceutical companies, health care companies.
If we wake up the morning after the election and he’s won, it’s likely we look back and say they pushed all the noise to the side. Democrats were able to put internal party issues and current foreign-policy issues to the side.
In that scenario, Biden will have successfully prosecuted a campaign focused on the material desires and needs of the voters who had already written off the sort of personalities of the candidates. And at a time of very high economic anxiety, voters were responsive to a campaign that was focused on “Here’s what we can do for you. I am on the side of the working middle class. Donald Trump is on the side of the wealthy.”
Donald Trump and the Republicans understand that this is the focal point, the center of gravity of the campaign. The new Republican Party platform leads with material concerns around inflation and affordability, energy production. It addresses immigration in a big way. It even talks about things like investing in our cities.
So the strength of American institutions and democracy — something the Biden campaign has been pushing — is not a core issue for most voters?
One thing we often forget in the political world is that most voters have a very low estimation of politics and the people involved in it, from the candidates to the operatives to the journalists. They view it as a game that is played by corrupt people, people in it for themselves.
So if 99% of politics is stupid BS, voters are constantly looking for the 1% that meets their needs and desires. Right now, those needs and desires are mostly economic, mostly tied to prices and inflation.
You have probably 5-10 million people on each side of the political divide who watch Fox News or MSNBC ― people who follow politics day to day. Those are the people who we consider “high-information voters.” They just care about more of the information our politics produces. And these voters might be more susceptible to idealistic appeals.
President Joe Biden (right) and former President Donald Trump debate in Atlanta on June 27. Biden's performance shook confidence in his ability to compete.
Some of the voters we might call “low information,” they really just don’t care about that stuff, and we don’t need them to. We shouldn’t expect them to.
Of course, not all voters who we’d describe as “low information” are “swing” voters ― the kind of voters who are genuinely torn about which presidential candidate to support. There are plenty of partisan voters who don’t consume a steady diet of political media and are mostly concerned with what politics can do for them.
Who are the “swing” voters that will decide this election?
The number of voters who could go either direction in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia is just a few hundred thousand ― maybe 500,000 on the high end. The polling changed after the debate, but so far there is nothing to suggest that any swing state has either gotten away from one candidate or is now firmly with a candidate.
The swing voters are still swinging. Reverse engineering a Biden victory is mostly swinging them your way. You don’t need them to fall in love with Joe Biden.
What does a smart “material” message from Biden look like?
Poll after poll shows that voters blame prices and inflation on a combination of government spending and corporate greed. That is why Blueprint has occasionally talked about a topic that is sometimes uncomfortable for Democrats, which is fiscal responsibility, and transmitting a fiscal responsibility message to voters. The White House has occasionally done this. They do love touting their deficit and debt numbers. They think they’ve done a good job there.
The strongest way to make the case that a vote for Joe Biden will result in the actions that you want to see happen is to show the actions that Joe Biden is already responsible for: the policy accomplishments of this administration that are popular but remain largely unknown. Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster, Blueprint
I think that’s a strong message for them, but the corporate greed stuff is really fertile territory.
We tested who voters hate the most. And they hate the health care companies. They hate Big Pharma.
The Biden administration has done a lot to fight for people against those businesses in terms of Medicare drug price negotiation , insulin price caps , things like this. Those test off the charts!
That’s what should be coming out of Democrats’ mouths in any given sentence.
If you need to talk about democracy, it should be discussed through the lens of class loyalty that Joe Biden has. Democracies are cool to advocate for the interests of working people and middle-class people against big business who would otherwise buy our government.
“I’m fighting for you against people trying to rip you off. I’m the one who’s working and fighting to bring down everything from your grocery prices to the cost of your health care. And I’m the one who’s going to hold the line on taxes and make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t conduct a fire sale of the American tax code to the wealthy and big business.” That’s more or less the ballgame. And I would love to see that message prosecuted in every single channel we have with every dollar available to us.
What about abortion rights? That was a winning issue for Democrats in the midterm elections. What role might that issue play in a Biden win?
I’ve been a believer that Democrats need to pay more attention to what Republicans do and the signals they send us about what they think will win them the election, and be responsive to those signals. And clearly one of the signals that they’re sending, and that Donald Trump is personally sending, is he doesn’t think the current abortion policy of the Republican Party is a winner for him. He’s absolutely right.
One thing I’ve struggled to get to the bottom of is that we see abortion and reproductive rights test well, but we don’t always see it as successful as the economic message ― possibly because those contrast messages test as well as they do. Voters are just really responsive to the economy.
President Joe Biden greets supporters Sunday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A Democratic pollster said "swing" voters respond most to hearing about Biden's economic policies.
What’s actually happening, frustratingly, is that voters care a lot about reproductive rights and freedom. It is a huge winning issue. The sort of arcane way in which Donald Trump is responsible for the destruction of reproductive rights in this country via the Supreme Court and the time lag between when he was in office and when those rights eroded under the Dobbs decision makes it harder to stick to him in this election.
How does Biden sell voters on the message you want him to carry if they don’t have confidence in his health and mental acuity, which they might see as prerequisites for successfully implementing policy?
It’s an important factor. Voters need to feel they can draw a line from A to B on “I cast a vote and something good happens for me, or something I want to see in the world happens.” That requires the belief that the person they’re voting for is capable of making that thing happen.
The strongest way to make the case that a vote for Joe Biden will result in the actions that you want to see happen is to show the actions that Joe Biden is already responsible for: the policy accomplishments of this administration that are popular but remain largely unknown .
You need to be reassured of President Biden’s competence and ability to deliver? Here are the things he’s delivered.
Advertising needs to carry a lot of that burden.
So many of the policy accomplishments of this presidency have been drowned out by either political noise, like what’s happening right now, which is of very little interest to voters, or a lot of foreign policy stuff. That’s not just Israel-Palestine, but also Afghanistan and Ukraine. This presidency has seen a lot of extremely newsy foreign policy stuff [come up].
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