When Joe Biden Plays Pundit
One Saturday earlier this month, Joe Biden surprised his audience. He was standing in front of an intimate crowd on the banks of Lake Washington at a former Microsoft exec’s home, which was so impeccably decorated that Biden jokingly called it the “Seattle Art Museum.” He was riffing on the software behemoth’s recent investments in Wisconsin, and, having mentioned the hotly contested battleground state, he drifted into some brass-tacks about the state of his reelection campaign. Instead of sticking to his usual lines about the race’s existential stakes, though, he brought up some little-noticed GOP primary vote tallies. “Trump continues to lose a gigantic chunk of his Republican colleagues,” he earnestly informed the gathered liberals. Earlier that week, in Indiana, “over 120,000 voted for a woman who dropped out of the race, Nikki Haley,” the president said. And, he added, 150,000 had chosen Haley over Trump in Pennsylvania. “In the Pennsylvania primary, I got over 100,000 more votes in the Democratic primary than Trump did in the Republican primary.” He kept digging deeper into the numbers, hoping to make his point stick. “I got 900,000 votes. Trump, a little under 800,000.”
It was no campaign rally, and it wasn’t how Biden usually presents himself in public. But it was just the latest example of how, when he gets visibly looser in the company of longtime friends and supporters in well-appointed living rooms and ornate hotel ballrooms away from TV cameras, the president has been playing pundit-in-chief about his own reelection. The remarks are always eventually published by the White House, but they’re seldom read closely, and only rarely are they the subject of much coverage. And especially in recent weeks they have provided an underappreciated view of the president’s shifting take on his own uncomfortably close race against Donald Trump. It’s a sometimes-frustrated perspective that has often cut against the grim public view of his chances. In the face of numbers showing him losing to Trump, he’s gotten close to dismissing the polling industry altogether thanks to the low response rates to pollsters’ phone calls. Sometimes, though, he embraces specific polls and even overplays how positive some have been for him. And he has revealed his faith in his campaign infrastructure even as he acknowledges that the race is closer than he’d like it to be.
His most recent turn — arguing in the last weeks that Trump is far weaker within his own party than most observers believe, using Haley’s numbers to make the case — is half a level of political analysis more specific than many candidates like to go in fundraising events with donors. (It also came before Haley said on Wednesday that she’d vote for Trump in November.) The Democrats who attend such events are far more used to hearing lightly modified stump speeches clearly designed to invigorate their wallet-opening reflexes over canapés. Biden still does that part, of course, but his bits of punditry tend to come in the opening parts of those evenings, when he’s mostly on script and before he takes questions from the crowds.
For years, he has told a series of now-familiar stories at these events — about the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville inspiring him to run in 2020, about European leaders horrified by Trump — and the bulk of his speaking time is usually dedicated to reciting his own accomplishments and hammering home the danger of Trump’s return. Occasionally he’ll muse about his media coverage or tell an old tale about the city he’s in. And sometimes he uses these events to reply to Trump’s latest outrage. On Tuesday, at his second fundraiser of the night in Boston (this one, at a hotel, featuring a Yo-Yo Ma performance), he called Trump’s boosting of a video featuring a newspaper clipping calling for “a unified Reich” “not the language of an American president. That’s not the language of any American. That’s the language of Hitler’s Germany.” Last month, in Chicago, Biden warned that voters wouldn’t fall for Trump’s attempt to soften his position on abortion: “he’s worried voters are going to hold him accountable for overturning Roe v. Wade and for the cruelty and chaos that it’s created. Well, the bad news is, for him, he bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade. The voters are going to hold him accountable.” But only recently has Biden begun spending stretches at a time sounding a bit like a cable commentator when it comes to the horse-race.
Though he has always projected confidence even while polls show him losing or tied, the evolution of Biden’s take has been especially stark since last November. That’s when a tranche of bleak swing-state polls from the Times and CNN ignited the most urgent round of Democratic freakouts about Biden’s political standing and the election to date. Just days after those surveys showed Trump winning across the battlegrounds and the should-Biden-drop-out chatter restarted, Democrats won a handful of off-year races. Biden soon found himself venting to donors gathered at a glass art studio in Chicago that he’d been prematurely written off once again — a reflection of the chip-on-shoulder attitude typical of his political advisors — and that his supporters would be wise to keep that in mind with the 2024 agita rising.
His central political calculus hadn’t changed because of the surveys, he suggested: voters were rejecting Trump-style extremism everywhere. He reeled off a long list of that week’s liberal election victories, then stopped cold. “Of course, at the start of the week, everyone was telling me that Governor Andy Beshear lost and the Republicans were going to win in Virginia, and the Constitution — the right to choose — was going to go down the drain, and so on.” He told the crowd that “the press have been talking about two polls and what great difficulty I’m in” but that “at the same time, there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 other polls. In every one, we’re winning, except for two we’re tied. The point is that the CNN and New York Times poll is the only thing you heard about. So, your money is not wasted yet. I can still screw it up, but we’re not there yet.”
This read on the situation was unsurprising to those close to Biden, and to those party insiders who’d sought reassurance from the president’s confidants that fall. Yet it failed to calm his party’s nerves, not least because pointing out liberal successes did little to address the problem of Biden’s own unpopularity.
And in the opening days of 2024, as the conventional wisdom of his political weakness congealed, he largely abandoned the topic at his fundraisers, returning to more comfortable territory. It wasn’t until the second week of February, as he finished a long day of raising cash in Manhattan, that he lightly returned to the idea that he was the victim of constant underestimation while standing in financier Steve Rattner and refugee specialist Maureen White’s seafoam-shaded Upper East Side living room. There, he attributed his 2020 victory to his argument that democracy hung in the balance, even as many in his party have consistently tried to get him to focus more publicly on other issues, especially economic ones.
“What’s happening is that the American people thought democracy was at stake. The intelligentsia wasn’t so sure about it, but the American people thought it,” he told the crowd of around 50, including Robert DeNiro. “What happened was— remember, we weren’t supposed to win in 2020. We weren’t supposed to be able to put this together. We won, and then in 2022, there was— a great red wave was going to come. Remember? Going to wipe all the Democrats out.” He recalled his party’s midterm victories and pointed again to the previous November’s wins in states such as Kentucky and Virginia. Clearly something stuck as he spoke: the line of argument soon became a staple of his quiet money events, even as the external Democratic mood about his prospects continued to darken. “In 2020, we were supposed to get shellacked,” he reminded a crowd at a housing developer’s Los Altos Hill, California home. “2022, we were supposed to get blistered.” And just that November, “we were supposed to be clobbered.”
Still, no matter how friendly or deep-pocketed his immediate environment, he remained reticent to reveal any sophisticated understanding of the new political landscape — or, more to the point as far as his backers were concerned, any direct response to the increasingly urgent angst about his prospects against Trump.
It was only after his steady State of the Union performance started to assuage some Democratic nerves that he landed on a more specific case for confidence in his campaign, telling a buoyant crowd of 100 supporters gathered in a Dallas trial lawyer’s backyard for his first closed-door money event after the speech about the campaign’s 1.3 million contributors and the massive gulf created by his campaign’s achievement of establishing 100-plus field offices around the country before Trump opened one.
And only after his blockbuster Manhattan fundraiser with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in March did he begin forcefully pressing the idea that, in fact, he wasn’t losing at all and that the political media was simply missing the big picture in favor of an unfair focus on bad polls. “You know, while the press doesn’t write about it, we’ve been several— we have several national polls, and we’re leading, since the State of the Union address,” he insisted to his national finance committee at the Intercontinental Barclay in Midtown the morning after the bash with his predecessors. (Just minutes earlier, he’d led the chummy crowd in a round of “happy birthday” for DNC finance chair Chris Korge.) He got more specific a few days later in Chicago, at a financier’s home just south of the Drake Hotel: “While the press doesn’t write about it, we have 18 national polls in the recent past, just since — I guess it was about four weeks, three, four weeks now — where, those 19 polls, we’re ahead of Trump. They never write that,” he insisted, pointing out recent polling leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania in particular, but not stopping to acknowledge that he was exaggerating the number of good polls for him.
It was fully springtime when the president began sharing a slightly more statistics-based take, both aiming to reassure his nervous backers and to demonstrate that his campaign did, in fact, have a plan. He began dissecting recent polls at Michael Douglas’s home in the Hudson Valley late last month. (Catherine Zeta-Jones was busy filming Wednesday, so she couldn’t make it.) Biden told the 100 donors in the actor’s backyard that he led 10 of the last 23 polls, that eight showed Trump ahead, and that five revealed a tie. He singled out the NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll, and specifically pointed out his lead among likely voters in the survey. And a few days later, at a private gathering for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander backers at DC’s Mayflower Hotel, he offered new reassurance about the still-troubling numbers, suggesting he didn’t think many voters would “really begin to focus” until later this summer, at which point he presumably expects to regain a lead.
But only in recent weeks has his impatience with the entire idea that he’s losing become a clear throughline of his evaluation of the state of play — a turn that has alarmed some supporters who see questioning polls’ accuracy as simple denial. “It’s hard to get a good poll these days, you know, to be able to call someone on a cell phone and get them to answer— most people don’t have hardlines anymore,” he kvetched in Chicago mid-month, shortly before insisting, at Marissa Mayer’s house in Palo Alto, “I, quite frankly, don’t think the polls mean anything today. It’s awful hard to get a read of a poll” since “my pollsters tell me that you have to contact an enormous number of people just to get a response.” (This particular line came only seconds after he cheered positive findings in a Quinnipiac poll in Wisconsin and an Ipsos/ABC nationwide survey.)
By the second half of the month, though, this line of complaint was mostly gone, replaced by more sunny poll interpretation. Last weekend, he was on the money hunt again, this time at the grand Atlanta headquarters of the foundation of Athur Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the city’s professional football and soccer teams. In front of intricate tapestries of birds, Biden returned to his point about Haley’s lingering vote. And, he insisted to the 130 Georgians standing under the five chandeliers, some recent surveys contained more reason for confidence: “While the national polls basically have us tied with registered voters, in most of those same polls, we’re up four points with likely voters.” Biden paused. “But they’re all still too close.”