Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on Sunday brushed off low favorability numbers for President Biden and his policies, arguing Democrats often “overperform” polls when it actually comes down to the elections.
Anchor Shannon Bream pointed to recent Fox News polling that shows the majority of voters disapprove of Biden’s job, with his worst ratings on border security. She said Biden is “underwater” on a variety of issues, including the economy, China, inflation and the Israel-Hamas war.
Pressed on this finding, Coons told “Fox News Sunday,” “First, what matters is how people vote. And we have consistently, as Democrats, overperformed polls, not just in the special election that just happened in Long Island, in the midterms in ’22, but in election after election.”
Coons was referencing the special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District last month, in which Democrat Tom Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Pilip to fill the seat of former Rep. George Santos (R), who was ousted from the lower chamber in December in the wake of various criminal charges and a scathing ethics report.
In the 2022 midterms, Democrats defied low expectations and were able to grow their majority in the Senate, along with retaining and winning a number of gubernatorial and state-level races.
Coons also claimed Trump is “underperforming” and pointed to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s numbers in Michigan, where she picked up nearly 27 percent of the vote, according to Decision Desk HQ, a partner of The Hill. Trump, however, still had a more than 40-point lead, with about 68 percent support in the Great Lakes State.
Trump has beaten Haley by a wide margin in every state primary contest they have faced off in so far, though Haley has vowed to remain in the race until at least Super Tuesday.
“And whether it’s in South Carolina, New Hampshire, or this coming Super Tuesday, we have 20 percent or more of voters saying they will never vote for former President Trump, partly because of his 91 criminal counts that he’s facing, partly because of the chaos that he created as a former president, partly because of his ongoing statements,” Coons added, later pointing to a recent gaffe from Trump where he confused former President Obama for Biden.
It was not immediately clear which polling Coons was referencing, though a poll released last month from Bloomberg and Morning Consult found that 53 percent of voters in key swing states would refuse to vote for Trump if he were convicted of a criminal offense. Trump faces 91 criminal counts across four state and federal indictments in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
Bream pushed back on this argument, arguing when people are asked about core policy issues, they say Trump is better equipped to handle things, notably on the border.
Coons responded by pointing to the failed bipartisan border security deal that was torpedoed last month by Senate GOP members at the direction of Trump.
“And as you saw in their two border visits this week, President Biden asked former President Trump to work with him, to stop seeking an election issue, but instead deliver a solution for the American people,” Coons said. “Former President Trump called his allies in the Senate and defeated that bipartisan bill because he wants an issue, not a solution.”
When it comes to national polling, Trump and Biden remain neck and neck, though the former president has a slight, nearly 3-point lead over Biden, according to polling indexes by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill.