Is Joe Biden Doing Better Than We Think?
Can the wide gap between Biden's polling support among white and minority voters explain why the presidential race seems to close?
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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Apologies for this piece showing up in your inbox so late on a Friday, but I had to do a lot of research and interviews to put it together — and I wanted to cover as many bases as possible — so it took a bit longer than expected.
A Polling Conundrum
The other day, I said we should probably ignore the polls until after the Biden and Trump debate (less than two weeks from today). Something came up this week that caused me to amend that rule.
As regular readers of Truth and Consequences likely know, I think Ron Brownstein is the most astute political observer in the business. And he’s been arguing for several months now that one of the most important data points from presidential polling is that Biden is holding his own among white voters.
As he wrote in March, “Trump’s lead in polls is often based solely on him significantly improving on his 2020 showing among voters of color.”
The above-mentioned poll from Echelon Insights (which has Biden +1 over Trump in a head-to-head matchup) is more of the same.
The poll has Biden at 68% among Black voters. In 2020, he won 92% of the Black vote (as an FYI, I am using Pew Research’s poll of validated voters for my 2020 estimates. Other exit polling shows different results, but I think Pew has the best data).
Among Hispanic voters, he’s winning 49%. That’s ten points lower than his numbers in 2020.
Among those 18-34, Biden is at 46%. He won approximately 60 percent of the 18-29 contingent in 2020 (I wish pollsters would use one of the other, 18-29 or 18-34, but they don’t, so the numbers on young voters might be slightly skewed).
Here’s some valuable historical context. In 1960, Richard Nixon, the GOP presidential candidate, won approximately one-third of the Black vote. Four years later, Lyndon Johnson won more than 90 percent of the Black vote, a result of both a presidential landslide for Democrats and Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 (and GOP candidate Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the bill).
Going back to 1932, Democrats had always won the Black vote but never topped 80 percent. After 1960, for 15 straight elections, they haven’t fallen below that number.
Now, it’s possible 2024 will see the greatest shift in African-American voting patterns in more than five decades, and Joe Biden will win a smaller percentage of the black vote than any Democrat since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
But don’t count on it.
There is not just one poll showing Biden faltering among Black voters.
The recent Civiqs/Daily Kos poll, which has Biden and Trump tied, gives Biden 75 percent of the Black vote—17 points lower than his 2020 performance.
The CBS/YouGov poll has Biden at 81 percent with Blacks (overall, the poll has Trump +1).
The Yahoo/YouGov poll, which has Biden up 2, has him at 79% among Black voters.
Remember last month's Siena/NYT poll that had Biden losing all the battleground states except Wisconsin? It had him at 63 percent with Black voters in a head-to-head matchup with Trump and at 49 percent with the inclusion of third-party candidates.
In his two previous runs for national office, Trump won 8 percent of the Black vote both times. What’s the argument for how or why he will suddenly and dramatically increase that total? Trump may improve among Black voters. I’m skeptical that it will be as large as some of these polling results suggest.
That’s not even taking into account Biden’s poor poll results with Hispanic voters — and young people.
In 2020, Biden won 59% of the Hispanic vote—a 7-point decline from Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016. Of the aforementioned recent polls, only one has Biden above 50 percent with this crucial segment of the electorate. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Biden’s support among Hispanic voters drops to around 50 percent. That’s a bit hard to imagine, but at least there is a precedent in the decline from 2016 to 2020. But a nearly ten-point shift after a seven-point shift in Hispanic voting patterns in just eight years would be unprecedented.
(Moreover, it’s worth noting that half of all Hispanic voters are in Texas and Florida, and the two states where Hispanic voters are likely to play a decisive role are Arizona and Nevada. In both of those states, Biden basically matched Clinton’s vote totals with Hispanic voters, even though his national numbers with this cohort declined).
Finally, there are Biden’s numbers with younger voters. In 2020, Biden won the 18-29 demographic by 24 points (59-35).
In the Echelon poll, Trump is beating him among the 18-34 contingent. NYT/Siena also has Biden losing 18-29-year-olds in the battleground states. Meanwhile, the CBS poll has him up 20 with under 30 voters; he’s up 25 (55-30) in the Yahoo/YouGov poll and below 50 percent (and up 9) in the Civiqs poll. Meanwhile, in last month’s Harvard Youth poll (the gold standard poll for youth voters), Biden is ahead 8 points among all 18-29-year-olds — and 19 with likely voters.
In short, choose your own adventure.
And to Brownstein’s point about Biden’s support with white voters, all the aforementioned polls have Biden garnering between 39 and 42 percent of the white vote (Echelon is the outlier at 45% ). When you factor in that around 8-10 percent are either undecided or leaning toward a third-party candidate, Biden is around 43 percent, with those votes expressing a preference for one of the two candidates. Why does that matter? Because 43 percent is the white support he received when he won the White House in 2020.
Gallup, We Have A Problem
So, how do we explain these polling discrepancies?
Look at the numbers, and you might notice a pattern. Among white voters, we’re seeing reasonably consistent polling results (Brownstein made the same observation in March).
The numbers for black, Hispanic, and younger voters are all over the map. For example, among Black voters, Biden has gotten anywhere from 68 to 81 percent in recent polls. We see the same variance among younger voters and Hispanics (the Echelon and NYT polls show Biden losing young voters to Trump).
Now, maybe Biden’s problem is that Black, Hispanic, and younger voters are abandoning Democrats, and we’re seeing a historic shift among these three groups.
Or maybe these are voters who are particularly upset with Biden and telling pollsters that they won’t support him for re-election but will ultimately return to their ancestral political home.
Or maybe … this is a polling issue.
Maybe since white voters make up a larger share of the population, it’s easier to get a large, representative sample, and the numbers are relatively consistent. And maybe since Black, Hispanic, and young voters make up a much smaller share of the population — and getting anyone to talk to pollsters is more difficult than ever— pollsters are forced to rely on smaller sample sizes and getting skewed, non-representative results.
My problem with this argument is obvious: why are the polls skewed in one direction—against Biden? One thing you do hear from those close to the Biden campaign is that their polling is not finding the same lackluster results with minority voters. Indeed, Brownstein makes the same observation.
Some Democratic pollsters who focus on voters of color question the size of the minority polling samples that produce these results and insist they do not find nearly this much erosion for Biden in their own polls. But others in the party acknowledge the trend of diminishing non-White support for Biden is real (even if they do not believe it is always as pronounced as these public polls find.)
Since the campaigns are spending more money on polling — and relying on a larger sample size of voters — they are getting more accurate results that don’t show the same large declines as in public polls.
I’m not convinced that polling errors can explain all of this. Too many surveys show a decline in Biden’s support among Black, Hispanic, and young voters for that to be the explanation.
I could, however, imagine a confluence of factors at play. There’s a perceptible shift in minority support toward Trump … minority voters and young voters are more unhappy with Biden than white voters … and the polling is simply off.
Maybe Biden’s weakness among young voters is the meta explanation for his declining support among Black and Hispanic voters, or, in simpler terms, much of his decline in minority support is coming from younger members of these cohorts. The reason this issue is not showing up the same way among white voters is that minority voters are angrier with Biden, or he’s offsetting any losses among younger white voters with gains with white suburban voters who are abandoning the GOP for the Democratic Party (which is a process we’ve seen take place over the last three election cycles). By this logic, Biden and the Democrats have maxed out their support with Black and Hispanic voters and aren’t able to gain many new voters from either cohort.
Looking Toward November
Of course, the bigger and more important question is where we will end up in November.
Let’s consider three possible scenarios.
Biden’s support among white voters remains consistent, but he never recovers with historically Democratic-leaning groups and loses a narrow election.
Biden’s support among white voters declines; he never recovers with historically Democratic-leaning groups and loses the election.
Biden’s support among white voters remains consistent, and his numbers gradually improve with historically Democratic-leaning groups (Blacks, Hispanics, and young people) who return to their usual voting patterns and support the Democratic candidate for president. He wins by a similar margin to his victory in 2020.
I vote for option number three because, quite simply, it makes the most sense — and it’s most consistent with past voting patterns.
I’m not saying that any of this is going to happen. Polling is a valuable snapshot of where the electorate stands at any given moment, but it’s not necessarily predictive. However, if Biden maintains his current polling support with white voters, the election will come down to his ability to win back minority voters and young people. If you take into account past voting patterns, it seems more likely than a historic drop-off in a Democratic candidate’s numbers with those groups.
Musical Interlude
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