HMM: Biden Plunges in Swing States in Leaked Post-Debate Poll.
A confidential polling memo circulating among anxious Democrats is confirming some of their worst fears: President Joe Biden’s support has started to tumble in key electoral battlegrounds in the wake of his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta, and Biden’s diminished standing is now putting previously noncompetitive states like New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico in play for Donald Trump. What’s more, Biden has taken such a reputational hit that he is polling behind other alternative Democratic candidates—including Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer—in hypothetical one-on-one matchups against Trump.
The memo was put together after the debate by OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit that conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign. OpenLabs is something of a black box: Their website is mostly blank, they don’t seek publicity, and their client list is closely held. But their data-driven memos are trusted in Democratic circles, and typically passed around to a small group of clients and strategists. One of those Democrats forwarded me the OpenLabs document on Tuesday morning.
I figured it was pretty much impossible to poll worse than Harris, whose 2020 primary race folded before Iowa.
More:
The survey also found that Biden is now losing in New Hampshire, news that aligns with a Saint Anselm College poll released Monday showing Trump suddenly winning the Granite State. It’s the drip-drip of polls like these that will continue to put pressure on Biden and his team in the coming weeks, even as they seek to move on from the debate, as my colleague John Heilemann astutely noted on Monday. The other signal that will be closely watched by the Biden campaign is whether senior party members, many of whom made a show of circling the wagons over the weekend, begin to break ranks. If Biden’s falling stature starts to damage Senate and House candidates down the ballot, Democrats on Capitol Hill might take their private concerns public and demand that Biden step aside before the Democratic National Convention in August.
Related: Texas Democrat openly calls on Biden to leave presidential race. “A Texas congressman is the first sitting Democratic lawmaker to call for Joe Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee, after his disastrous debate performance last week.”
Ed Morrissey adds: “Doggett is no spring chicken either. He’ll turn 78 in October, and has served for almost 30 years in Congress. He’s also safely ensconced in a D+24 district in Austin (TX-37), so it’s not as if he’s particularly vulnerable in an electoral collapse created by Biden either. If the White House has lost Doggett, they’re in trouble — big trouble.”
Emphasis in the original.