Democratic strategist David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Obama, said in a Sunday interview that he is not concerned about poor polling numbers for President Biden a year away from the 2024 election.
“I have no concerns about polls a year out. I mean, you have to look at them and analyze them and adjust,” Axelrod said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“But I was in a situation as a strategist for Barack Obama in 2011, where we were facing some difficult polls,” he noted.
Axelrod’s comments come as Biden has faced a series of bad polls in the last few weeks, including a New York Times/Siena College poll that showed Biden trailing former President Trump in a hypothetical rematch in five of six key battleground states. Axelrod also pointed to a subsequent CNN poll showing similar results.
Axelrod noted, however, that the primary concern he has is with voters’ concern about age.
“The one number in the polling that was concerning — and in the CNN poll that followed after the New York Times poll — had to do with age, and that’s one thing you can’t reverse,” he said.
“No matter how effective Joe Biden is behind the scenes, in front of the camera, what he’s projecting is causing people concerns, and that’s worrisome,” Axelrod said.
Axelrod has recently come under scrutiny for comments he made suggesting Biden might want to consider stepping aside ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Axelrod clarified in the CNN interview, however, that he was not calling on Biden to step aside and instead only stressed that he “ought to think about it.”
Biden, at 80 years old, is the oldest president to serve in the White House. Trump, the leading GOP candidate in 2024, is 77 years old.