Anguish about Joe Biden’s candidacy is rational, polls suggest

IF JOE BIDEN and Donald Trump have one thing in common, it is that they don’t trust the polls. During the Republican primaries, Mr Trump referred to polls that showed his opponent Nikki Haley too close for comfort as “just another scam”. Now Mr Biden has cast doubt on polls that show him trailing Mr Trump in swing states or plagued by historically low approval ratings. “I don’t believe that’s my approval rating,” he shot back at George Stephanopoulos in a prime-time interview on ABC, which was meant to assuage Democrats’ anxieties after his terrible debate performance against Mr Trump. “That’s not what our polls show,” he added, referring to his campaign’s internal polling.

Mr Biden did not elaborate on what exactly those more sympathetic polls show. But the public ones suggest that, on average, his polling deficit has increased by 1.7 points since the debate. Mr Trump’s lead now equals the largest he has had in any of his three presidential campaigns. Even a small change is possible to detect because pollsters have consistently asked the public for their views on Messrs Trump and Biden, who have both campaigned as the presumptive presidential nominee for about four months. Unfortunately for Democrats who would like to identify the most electable alternative to Mr Biden, recent polls offer few clear answers.

Across 11 firms that polled voters both shortly before and after the debate, Mr Biden’s support dropped by less than half a point while Mr Trump’s rose by 1.3 points. There have been too few swing-state polls since the debate to build a robust average. But if this shift is replicated in battleground states, where Mr Biden already mostly trailed Mr Trump by a larger margin than nationwide, that will paint a still darker picture for Democrats. Mr Biden lags behind some Democratic senators running for re-election in states like Nevada and Wisconsin. That trend, if confirmed, would suggest that Mr Biden’s unpopularity, not the Democrats’ brand, is to blame.

If Mr Biden steps aside, how would his vice-president and heir-apparent, Kamala Harris, fare against Mr Trump? A handful of polls conducted after the debate show her trailing him by an average of 3.4 points. That looks bad for Ms Harris. But in the seven polls to ask about both Mr Biden and Ms Harris, she leads her boss in two and ties in one. Her average is worse because of two very bad polls which may be outliers.

In addition to their paucity, these polls tell us little. Ms Harris has not headlined a presidential campaign. She does not usually feature in the television adverts flooding the airwaves in battleground states (where in June the Biden campaign outspent the Trump campaign five-to-one). And though Ms Harris ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, where she polled in single digits by the end of her campaign, it is likely that voters do not remember, or never knew, her policy platforms.

Until recently, the strongest piece of evidence against Ms Harris’s electability was her favourability ratings. For much of Mr Biden’s presidency, fewer Americans told pollsters at YouGov that they held a favourable view of Ms Harris than of the president, while the same number held an unfavourable view. In the past year this has shifted. The number saying they have a favourable view of Mr Biden has fallen—to match those with a favourable view of Ms Harris—while the number with an unfavourable view of him has crept up (see chart). A small portion of Americans say they “don’t know” if they have a favourable view of Ms Harris, perhaps enough to give her wriggle room in an election that may be decided by a few thousand votes.

If Democrats decided that their familial strife is too dull, they could hold a rapid-fire primary, as Jim Clyburn, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina, mentioned recently (a spokesperson later said he was merely speaking about a hypothetical scenario). Polling can reveal even less about how candidates without the national profile of Ms Harris might fare. In a recent YouGov/The Economist poll, 26% of respondents said they had a favourable view of Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. But 45% said they had no opinion at all. Some 30% said the same of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, and Pete Buttigieg, the transport secretary.

Low name-recognition does not mean that the alternatives to Mr Biden would be poor candidates, just that many people have yet to form an opinion. But the polls cannot answer the real question at hand for the Democratic Party’s elites: is Mr Biden fit to run a gruelling four-month campaign and then serve until he is 86 years old? The voters, it seems, have decided he can’t—61% of respondents told YouGov that Mr Biden’s health and age would severely affect his ability to fulfil his duties as president if he were re-elected. ■