Democratic senators are expressing alarm and bewilderment over new polling data showing that President Biden is trailing former President Trump in five battleground states, creating a political headwind for the party’s Senate candidates running in the same states.
Democrats are worried about what Biden’s weak poll numbers say about his electability in 2024, though they insist that barring an unexpected major development, Biden will be the party’s nominee.
But they acknowledge that Biden’s age — 80 years old — is clearly a problem for many voters.
“I hear immense praise for what he has done and how well he is doing on foreign policy and on extremism at home. He’s doing everything right, is what I’m hearing. And yet there’s this lingering concern about electability,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said.
“The question about the polls concerns people,” added Blumenthal, who noted that Trump, 77, isn’t much younger that Biden.
Senate Democrats say Biden needs to come up with a more forceful and progressive political message to rev up young voters. He is now essentially tied with Trump among voters ages 18 to 29. In 2020, Biden won this group with 60 percent of the vote while Trump only won 36 percent.
“I think the president needs to have a more forceful message, and there are issues in our democracy — like the creeping dark money corruption, and in our environment, like increasingly chaotic climate problems we’re having — that deserve a real fighting stance,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said.
“It’s useless to go to young people who actually understand what’s happening in climate and tell them, ‘Well, we passed the [Inflation Reduction Act],’” he said, referring to the bill Biden signed into law last year to make historic new investments in renewable energy technologies. “That’s been my pitch. You need to have a more forceful message and get it out there.”
Asked about polling showing that Biden would lose a presidential race to Trump despite the more than 90 felony charges facing the former president, Whitehouse said, “It’s undoubtedly weird.”
Democratic lawmakers are hoping Biden can turn around his presidential campaign by getting voters to focus on his accomplishments and on Trump’s flaws.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said, “We have work to do,” arguing that Biden “has a great story to tell that hasn’t been told yet, and that’s what campaigns are about.”
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) lamented that Trump “is bulletproof, politically” when it comes to GOP voters.
“I wish Joe Biden’s numbers were better, but I think with a year to go [until the election] we’ve got a lot of good stories to tell,” he said.
Durbin argued that voters aren’t yet looking at the presidential race closely enough and may well view Biden more favorably as the election nears.
“People don’t get focused on the fact that it would be a choice between two people, and that makes a big difference in whether they make a decision and how they decide,” he said.
Many Democratic lawmakers had assumed that Trump’s poll numbers with independent and swing voters would crater in the wake of the state and criminal indictments he faces.
Instead, Trump has pulled ahead of Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada, five states Biden won in 2020, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College.
Blumenthal said he is “mystified” by Trump’s lead in several battleground states given the serious federal charges levied against him by federal, state and local prosecutors.
“I have no explanation based on my lifetime in paying attention to American civic life and politics. In most times in our history, one indictment would have been enough to disqualify a presidential candidate for the types of crimes alleged,” Blumenthal said. “I’m mystified, perplexed, bewildered and, frankly, a bit angry that people can give [Trump] credibility.”
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who faces a tough reelection race in a state that Trump won with 57 percent of the vote in 2020, said he hopes that Biden can figure out a way to pump up his numbers.
“I’d like to see them better, but we’re a year out,” he said.
Democrats are especially concerned by the poll’s finding that 71 percent of registered voters think Biden is too old to be president and 62 percent say he doesn’t have the mental sharpness to be president.
Former President Obama’s senior political strategist on Sunday said Biden should weigh carefully whether he should run for a second term, given the devastating results of the Times/Siena poll.
“The stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore,” David Axelrod wrote in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”
No Democratic senator is willing to go that far.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) swatted away a question about Biden’s weak poll numbers Tuesday.
“I believe President Biden will win the election, he will beat President Trump and I believe that all of the good things that President Biden has done, the people are learning about it week by week, state by state,” he said.
Other Senate Democrats also insisted that Biden will win a second term, even though the early polls have given Trump an edge in key states.
“I don’t pay a lot of attention to polls a year out. Everything’s volatile. Biden’s going to win, I’m going to win. In the end, it’s whose side are you on,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who’s up for reelection in a state that Trump won twice.
“We’re getting things done,” Brown said, citing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package Congress passed in 2021 and the one-year expanded child tax credit, which helped lift 2.9 million children out of poverty.
A Senate Democratic aide predicted that vulnerable Democratic senators in Republican-leaning states such as Montana, Ohio and West Virginia would face more of a political headwind if Vice President Harris were the party’s nominee.
Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) pointed out that then-President Obama’s poll numbers didn’t look so great a year before his victory in the 2012 presidential race.
A Gallup poll conducted in 12 battleground states in late October 2011 found that voters in swing states thought a generic Republican candidate would do a better job than Obama in handling the federal deficit and unemployment.