Biden wants to see proof he can’t win. The polls show a nail-bitingly close race

Despite reporting that Joe Biden might be becoming more receptive to calls for him to step aside, he has for weeks rejected calls from within his party to end his candidacy for the presidency. Nothing but an intervention from the “Lord Almighty” would keep him from being the Democratic nominee, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. He was “1,000%” remaining in the race, “unless I get hit by a train”, he told Complex’s Chris “Speedy” Morman. Only a “medical condition” would push him out, he told BET’s Ed Gordon.

But he also indicated during a high-stakes news conference last week that he might be persuaded to step aside if his team came to him and said: “There’s no way you can win.” However, the 81-year-old president quickly followed up: “No one is saying that. No poll says that.”

Many Democrats have become increasingly convinced that the president is on track to lose re-election. Among them they are sharing dismal data indicating Biden’s continued presence on the ticket may also imperil the party’s chances of winning control of either chamber of Congress, while expressing alarm that the president has apparently not grasped the gravity of their predicament.

When Trump formally accepted the Republican nomination in Milwaukee on Thursday, he had opened his largest national lead yet, according to a new CBS News poll.

Publicly, Biden has declared the race against Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, a “toss up” while his campaign has presented what it says is a clear path to victory. The White House, meanwhile, has fiercely disputed numerous reports that Biden is considering dropping out of the race.

Though top-line polling shows a relatively stable – and nail-bitingly close – contest for the White House, the data paints a worrying picture for the president and his party.

Trump holds a narrow but consistent edge in almost every national poll since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, which compounded existing concerns about his fitness to serve another term. Internal Democratic polling reportedly contains even more calamitous predictions for the party.

Many of the public polling results are within the margin of error and there is variability depending on whether the survey considers likely voters or registered voters and when third-party candidates are included. Few surveys have yet to assess the race since the assassination attempt on Trump while he was campaigning in Pennsylvania last weekend.

Surveys of the battleground states, where the White House is won, also tend to show the former president pulling away by an even wider margin, unnerving Democrats who are deeply fearful of a Trump second term. Earlier this month, the Cook Political Report, an elections prognosticator, moved three key swing states – Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – from “toss up” to “lean Republican”. In a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, Trump held an edge across seven swing states.

Fueling Democrats’ concerns were a pair of New York Times/Siena College state polls that showed Biden trailing Trump in the must-win battleground of Pennsylvania and narrowly leading him in Virginia, a state the president carried by 10 percentage points in 2020.

Hypothetical match-ups between an alternative Democratic nominee and Trump offer only marginal reason for optimism. Some polls have found the vice-president Kamala Harris running even with or slightly stronger than Biden, while other possible candidates have performed even better, though they do not have the name recognition or national profile that Harris does.

Deep polarization means there are only so many truly undecided voters whose choice will determine the outcome of the election – an estimated 6% of voters in six states. Many of them are so-called “double haters” meaning they strongly dislike both presidential candidates. The result is a dynamic in which huge political events – like Trump being convicted by a Manhattan jury of 34 felony counts or Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month that precipitated calls for his withdrawal – have had little impact on the overall trajectory of the race.

A new survey appears to support that pattern. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after the assassination attempt against Trump found no major shift in voter sentiment. According to the poll, Trump led Biden by 2 percentage points among registered voters, which was within the margin of error.

By other metrics, Trump is in a considerably more desirable position. While both candidates are deeply unpopular, voters believe they will be better off economically under a Trump presidency. They trust the former president more on key issues, including the handling of inflation, immigration and, to a lesser extent, matters of foreign policy, an area Biden counts among his strong suits. More voters trust Biden on abortion policy and express confidence in his ability to work with members of the opposing party, which Americans say they want from their elected officials.

The CBS News poll, meanwhile, found that just 28% of voters think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. By contrast, nearly half of voters agreed that the 78-year-old former president had the mental acuity to serve as president. More Republicans than Democrats say they will definitely vote this year, it found, which tracks with polling that shows Trump voters are much more enthusiastic about their nominee than Biden voters are about theirs.

According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, 63% of voters describe both Biden and Trump as embarrassing, while roughly a quarter said they consider Biden “mentally sharp” – down from 53% in 2021. The survey found Trump with a 4 percentage point lead over Biden nationally.

As Biden publicly fights for his political survival, he has dismissed his detractors as “elites” and members of Washington DC’s “chattering class” who have long underestimated him. Yet a survey by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research this week found that among his own supporters, two-thirds of Democrats now say he should not be the nominee.

In a Friday interview on MSNBC, as more Democrats came forward to call on Biden to end his re-election bid, his campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said they were taking into account the “full picture”. She argued that the assessment should include, she argued, the “100,000 door-knocks” the campaign completed across the battleground states this week.

“We are not sitting back with our head in the sand without recognizing this has been a tough couple of weeks,” she said, adding: “We’re looking at analytics, we’re looking at polling, we’re seeing what a lot of people are seeing, of course.”

But, she insisted: “When you get to the bottom and the heart of what we are doing every day from the campaign, and we are dealing with the voters that are in battleground states, they have questions, but they are staying with Joe Biden, and our numbers are showing that.”