President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump by approximately one point in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. The gap is larger in most of the so-called swing states, including Pennsylvania (2.1 per cent), Arizona (4.3 per cent), Georgia (6.1 per cent), and Nevada (seven per cent). Moreover, in both 2016 and 2020, most polls ended up understating Trump’s support. This year, the head-to-head polls and Biden’s unpopularity have made many Democrats anxious about the coming election, but that feeling does not appear to have pervaded the White House. Axios reported last week that, “in public and private, Biden has been telling anyone who will listen that he’s gaining ground—and is probably up—on Donald Trump in their rematch from 2020.” (The Axios story says this sense of optimism is also shared by his “team.”)
One of the most prominent Democrats who seems to share Biden’s sense of optimism is Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Party strategist who runs the Substack Hopium Chronicles, and who is known to share good polls and good vibes with his audience on Twitter. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Trump’s polling numbers, whether the polls were really wrong in the 2022 midterms, and whether it is concerning that the White House is not more concerned.
A lot of Democrats and liberals are worried about the state of the Presidential race. You seem to have a different take. What do you think people are missing?
I think there has been a tendency in recent years among commentators to overestimate the strength of Republicans and to underestimate our strength. And we saw that play out in 2022. The fundamental dynamic of our politics, since the spring of 2022, has been consistent Democratic over-performance and consistent Republican underperformance. We saw it across the country in 2023. We’ve seen the same manifestation in 2024, with Trump struggling, and bleeding some of his votes, and underperforming polls in the primaries. And so, I think there’s just generally a view that, as people get closer to voting and have to go through that process of deciding who they’re going to get behind, Republicans lose ground and Democrats gain ground. And this has been particularly true after Dobbs. The whole political landscape in America changed fundamentally with Dobbs. And so any comparisons to 2016 and 2020, for example, I think are not valid because I think everything changed in 2022.
You’re definitely right that various commentators were wrong about 2022. But, broadly speaking, the polls were pretty accurate. There were—
No, that’s not true. That’s not true. I mean, we have to stop. People have to stop saying that. The RealClearPolitics final map for the Senate was fifty-four seats for the Republicans based on averages. [The actual projection was fifty-three seats.]
This is from FiveThirtyEight: “Despite a loud chorus of naysayers”—
They’re not correct.
Hold on, let me finish reading. “Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.”
They’re wrong about that. I mean, they’re just wrong. They’re wrong. I mean, I’m presenting you with facts. How in the world could polling averages be correct if they ended up with fifty-four seats in the Senate? And I have an explanation.
Some of the Senate races were perceived to be close. Democrats won those races when some people thought Republicans were going to narrowly win them.
No, but what FiveThirtyEight wrote is not true. And I have a clear, definitive proof that what they wrote in that is not true. In 2022, there was an effort—and this has been documented again and again—by Republicans to flood the polling averages with bad polling, to push the polling averages to the right, which was then successful.
The entire political commentary in the final month before the election settled on the red wave. Shane Goldmacher wrote one in the New York Times. I was mocked and attacked by Nate Silver, by Dave Wasserman, and by all these other folks. Part of the reason I got the election right when almost nobody else did was that I separated out the Republican-heavy polling from the independent polling. And what we saw consistently is that, in the independent polling and independent-media polling, the election looked close and competitive. So, if you wanted to see a close and competitive election, there was a lot of data backing that up.
As FiveThirtyEight makes clear in their piece, “While the polls in a few closely watched races—like Arizona’s governorship and Pennsylvania’s Senate seat—were biased toward Republicans, the polls overall still had a bit of a bias toward Democrats. That’s because generic-ballot polls, the most common type of poll last cycle, had a weighted-average bias of D+1.9, and polls of several less closely watched races, like the governorships in Ohio and Florida, also skewed toward Democrats.”
I’m ending the interview. I’m ending the interview because what you’re doing is ridiculous.
Wait, wait—why?
Because I have definitive proof that what you’re saying is not true. And I don’t care. I know what FiveThirtyEight wrote. I live this every day. And so, the point is what you’re saying is wrong. I am on record saying that what FiveThirtyEight has written is incorrect, and I’ve given you definitive proof otherwise. So if you want to keep coming back at this, do it. But this has become one of the most ridiculous interviews that I’ve ever done my entire professional career.
Oh, O.K. Sorry.
So, the point I’m making is the polls couldn’t have been correct in 2022 if RealClearPolitics ended up at fifty-four seats in the Senate. I mean I just . . . it’s not possible, right?
Totally fair. Can I ask you a different question?
Yes.
I saw you said, “Trump to me, is a much weaker candidate than he was in 2016 and 2020.” Can you talk more about that?
Much weaker.
Tell us more.
So, I think, first of all, his performance on the stump is far more degraded. He’s clearly diminished. He’s far more erratic. He’s making a lot of mistakes that are hurting the campaign when he speaks. Second, his agenda is far more extreme, more dangerous, and will be far easier to exploit by the Democrats.
According to a CNN poll in April, fifty-five per cent of Americans say that they think Trump’s Presidency was a success, compare that with 2020, when his job approval was around forty-four per cent on Election Day. In November, 2016, his favorability rating was thirty-four per cent in Gallup. Now his favorability rating is in the low forties.
Right. So, the assumption with everything I’m telling you is that it is what I believe is going to happen as the campaigns are prosecuted over the next five and a half months. There are six things now that are true about him that were not true in 2020, that all voters are going to come to know in the following months—they are that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room [Trump, who has denied the allegations, was found liable for sexual assault in a civil case.]; that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history, and has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that; that he stole American secrets, he lied to the F.B.I., he shared those secrets with other people, it’s the greatest betrayal of our national security by a former President in all of American history; he led an insurrection against the United States, he led an armed attack on the Capitol, and he’s promised to end American democracy for all time if he’s in the White House in 2025; he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in American history; and sixth, and this is really important, is that he’s singularly responsible for ending Roe.
You presented a case, that I happen to agree with, about why Trump is very dangerous. But his Presidency, as I said, is still seen as a success now by the majority of Americans.
But this is what a campaign is for. This is what a campaign does.
He already led that insurrection, and his favorability rating is back now above where it was in the past. I know you can say that the campaign will deal with some of this stuff, and perhaps it will, but how do you understand these numbers?
It’s my belief that, when you prosecute all of these things, and establish this basic idea that Joe Biden has been a good President, and the country is better off, which is manifestly true—that in the prosecution of all of this, Trump will fall down, and we will win.
One of the places you could prosecute this case that you’re putting forward—with the largest audiences—would be debates. The Biden White House only wanted to do two debates, not the customary three. How do you understand that choice?
I think it was Trump that made the decision to go to two debates, wasn’t it?
No.
In 2020. He established the precedent of two debates. [There were three agreed-upon debates in 2020, but one was cancelled after Trump contracted COVID and refused to participate virtually.]
Biden could still ask for more than two debates this time.
I know, but they asked for two, and Trump agreed, and I think what was smart about this was that, first, it was unclear that he was going to accept any debates, regardless of what he was saying, because he did not participate in the Republican debates this time, and he did not participate in one of the debates last time. And, I think if you’re Bidenworld, and you believe that debates are good, which I think they are, you want them, and it’s going to help you win, then locking him into two debates is going to be easier than potentially locking him into more, given that he has a history of not showing up at debates.
Our theory of the case is that the more informed voters are about their choices, the more we gain. We are consistently performing better in the likely-voter polls than we are with registered voters. We have also seen Nikki Haley continuing to outperform expectations since she got out.
Are you talking about the so-called zombie vote?
Yeah. Republicans have had to go vote in these primaries, and a large number are not choosing him, right? They’re not choosing MAGA. A big chunk of the Republican coalition became loosened. We’re seeing that play out in the Republican primary. You’re also seeing it within the unprecedented rebellion against Trump happening among Republican leaders. There are two Republican former Vice-Presidents [Dick Cheney and Mike Pence] who are not supporting Trump, a former Party nominee [Mitt Romney], a former Vice-Presidential nominee [Paul Ryan].
The Times did something on the so-called zombie vote in Presidential primaries, and found that nineteen per cent of Republican primary voters were still voting against Trump. But that’s a smaller percentage than in any other Republican or Democratic primary in the past twenty-four years.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.
None of it matters?
No. What matters is in this election. In this election, you have this combination, you have an unprecedented set of circumstances where the Republican coalition has splintered. Now you have Mitt Romney going on TV, consistently telling Republicans not to vote for Trump. We’ve never seen anything like this, and I think it would be dangerous for commentators, who in 2022 got the election so wrong, to dismiss what we’re seeing.
But we saw it in 2016. A lot of Republicans came out and said, “I’m not voting for Trump.”
This is nothing like 2016. Not on this scale. Two former Vice-Presidents . . . this is nothing like what happened in 2016.
No. I think actually more in 2016—
No. No. No. Mike Pence, his Vice-President; Dick Cheney, former Vice-President; Mitt Romney, former Party nominee; Paul Ryan, former V.P. nominee and Speaker—all these former Republican officials, who served under Trump.
George W. Bush didn’t support Trump’s reëlection in 2020, nor his election in 2016.
Let’s see what he does this time. Let’s see what he does this time.
Just to clarify from before: NBC did invite Trump and Biden to do a third debate with Telemundo. The Trump campaign said yes, the Biden campaign said no. Just to clarify that.
That’s fine.
O.K. It is confusing, given that they want to prosecute this case, and this is the rare time that you get to prosecute this case.
I think you should direct that question to them.
Well, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is that there was a report in Axios recently that the Biden campaign doesn’t believe they’re behind, and that Biden himself doesn’t believe he’s behind—
I don’t think they’re behind.
Maybe a little bit of my concern is that that suggests that you don’t need a new strategy, you don’t need to do anything else, if you think you’re ahead. And that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.
No. No. But what I said, repeatedly, and what I write every day, and I even did a piece last week saying that the election is close, and neither candidate is ahead or behind.
I think it will be a close election, but, at the same time, as you’ve said, this guy tried to launch an insurrection, he has all these awful things about him, and he was, basically, behind in two straight Presidential elections, one of which he won, and both of which ended up understating his support in the polls.
Are you telling me anything I don’t know right now?
And now he is running against a President who has very low approval ratings, despite you saying he’s been a great President.
I understand all this, and I think that we, given that you’re a journalist, you can distinguish between what is true and what people believe, and these are not the same things. Right?
Exactly. That’s why I’m so concerned, because I’m afraid what people believe and what’s true are different, and that makes me very worried, and why I think that perhaps the White House should be thinking differently about this election.
I understand. And so, the point about this, though, is that, in a campaign, when the shooting starts, and the ads go on, you would rather be the side that is telling the truth than the side that isn’t. In all the Senate polling, our numbers are holding. In the House polling, the limited House polling that we have, things are looking very encouraging.
It almost suggests people just don’t like the incumbent President.
Well, right. Right. Right. So, structurally, the generic has moved in our direction, and we’re now consistently in positive territory in the generic. The generic, for me, in 2022, was a very important measure that ended up being far more accurate than many of the other measures about what happened in that election. There’s a serious poll that’s coming out in North Carolina, consistent with many other polls that have been done in North Carolina, showing that the race is within two points, and so I think the point I’m making is that my basic assessment is that I would much rather be us than them.
I am just looking at the FiveThirtyEight North Carolina polling average. Trump is ahead by six and a half points.
I understand.
This is an example of my concern about the way you’re talking about this.
I said there’s a poll coming out.
You said it was also like the other polls from North Carolina.
No. Forget the averages.
Forget the averages?
If you look at the averages, you’re going to be misled. You’re going to be misled about what’s happening. I explained earlier that what happened in 2022 was that the averages were wrong. O.K.? If you take out these Republican-funded polls, then the rest of the polling was pretty good.
You have talked a lot about bad Republican polls. In this cycle, some of Biden’s very bad numbers have been from really good pollsters, such as Ann Selzer at Grinnell and Nate Cohn at the New York Times. How do you understand that?
But that’s normal. It’s normal that there is a wide range of polling. And the critical thing to recognize is that the challenge we are having with polling right now is that it isn’t acknowledging the tension in the data. Not all the polling is saying the same thing. People are just choosing one piece of the data, or are using averages. If you have one CNN poll with Trump up six points, and one ABC poll with Biden up five, the average is Trump up by one point. But neither of the polls actually say that. [The actual average would be Trump up by half a point.] The average creates a new reality that doesn’t exist in either of the two polls. You have to be more conservative about your judgment.
You previously said, on a podcast in March, “the likely scenario at this point is that Biden’s up by two to three points by late April or early May as the Democratic coalition begins to come home.”
What has happened is that Biden’s numbers have moved up. We are in better shape than we were in early March. What we have to get beyond is the idea that there is an actual number where there is certainty about where the race is. That is fool’s gold. ♦
