Joe Biden’s case of epistemic closure
Accurate polling data does not seem to be reaching the Oval Office.
President Biden was asked at his press conference last week if he would step aside if his advisers came to him with polling data that showed Vice President Kamala Harris faring better than him against former President Donald Trump.
“No,” he responded, “unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win.’ Me. No one is saying that. No poll says that.”
It’s true that no one is saying there’s no way Biden can win: in our evenly divided country, it’s never wise to fully count out either the Democratic or Republican presidential nominee, considering they can each reliably count on at least 45% of the electorate to support them.
But, the fact remains that — right now — Biden is very clearly losing. What was once a tied race nationally has now morphed into a contest with a consistent two-point edge for Trump, according to the FiveThirtyEight national polling average. Biden’s position seems even more precarious in the Electoral College, where several states he won in 2020 appear to be slipping away from him, including Arizona (currently Trump +4.2), Georgia (Trump +4.6), and Nevada (Trump +4.6).
That leaves the president reliant on the three “Blue Wall” states — Michigan (Trump +0.7), Wisconsin (Trump +1.1), and Pennsylvania (Trump +2.8) — each of which are closer, but none of which it can be said he is currently leading at this stage in the campaign. Polls are even coming out showing a close race in states like Virginia (currently Biden +3.2), which Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020.
Meanwhile, several surveys have now shown Harris doing slightly better than Biden against Trump. A pair of recent New York Times/Siena polls show her outperforming him in Virginia and Pennsylvania, while Politico reported this morning on surveys by a Democratic polling firm that show “alternative Democratic candidates run ahead of President Biden by an average of three points across the battleground states.” (In those surveys, Harris runs behind the average Democratic alternative, but ahead of Biden.)
Perhaps most glaring for Democrats is the fact that Biden consistently runs behind his party’s Senate candidates in polling, suggesting that voters in key states are not necessarily averse to supporting Democrats this November. They just don’t want to support Biden.
Are these numbers reaching Biden, who has signaled he would listen to his advisers when they bring him campaign data?
It doesn’t seem like it.
“The polling data we’re seeing nationally and on the swing states has been essentially where it was before,” Biden told a group of House Democrats on a recent Zoom call, according to the Washington Post. “You noticed the last three polls, nationally, they had me up four points. And I mean, I don’t have much faith in the polls at all, either way, because they’re so hard to read anymore.”
Then comes the Post’s deadpan next paragraph:
The list of head-to-head national polls maintained by the 538 website shows no polls since June with Biden up by four percentage points. A Washington Post average of public polls since the debate shows Biden trailing Donald Trump nationally by more than two points, a loss of almost two points from his pre-debate standing in the same polls. The Biden campaign, in a response to a question, pointed to other national polls that showed Biden leading by as much as two points.
In case you need a translation, that’s newspaper-speak for “the president is not telling the truth.”
Or, perhaps, in this case, the truth isn’t being told to him. Biden increasingly seems to be suffering from epistemic closure, the refusal to take in data from sources telling you things you do not want to hear.
All the textbook signs are there. According to The New York Times, Biden has shrunk his inner circle since the debate, relying less on even his own campaign manager or chief of staff, and more on his family (including wife Jill and son Hunter) and a select group of longtime advisers, including Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed.
“Mr. Biden has not consulted directly with the pollsters on his 500-person campaign team about the state of the race against Donald J. Trump,” the Times reported, instead relying on Donilon to “summarize the numbers, with regular memos and numerous daily phone calls.”
That should be alarming to Democrats, considering that Axios has reported that that same trio of advisers is “careful about the tenor of the information they put in front of Biden, and shy away from telling him things that could be hurtful,” according to current and former Biden aides who spoke to the news outlet.
Seemingly stuck in a bubble of positive information, Biden has apparently lashed out when House Democrats have tried to challenge him in virtual meetings. Biden’s huddles with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition both reportedly ended in the same way, with the Zoom calls coming to an abrupt stop shortly after a Democratic lawmaker spoke up with their concerns about the president.
According to Puck News, which obtained a recording of the call, Biden grew especially testing in the meeting with the moderate New Democrats, even going so far as to demean a Democratic lawmaker’s military service record.
The exchange came when Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) pressed Biden about how important national security is to voters. (As I’ve noted, Biden’s stock defense of his record since the debate has revolved around NATO, despite a lack of polling data suggesting that is a particularly animating issue for the electorate.)
Here’s what happened next, per Puck:
“First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific Basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put AUKUS together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”
“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said Crow, “to our voters.”
“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”
“The call was even worse than the debate,” one House Democrat who participated told Puck. “He was rambling; he’d start an answer then lose his train of thought, then would just say ‘whatever.’ He really couldn’t complete an answer. I lost a ton of respect for him.”
“I imagine 50 people on that Zoom were ready to come out publicly against him” after the call, another lawmaker added.
But then, an hour later, Donald Trump was shot at — and suddenly, any attempt to dislodge Biden was put on hold, potentially for good.
Some congressional Democrats are hoping that the conversations pick back up again after the Republican convention ends on Thursday. Per Politico, they seem to be pinning their hopes on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has reportedly lost faith in Biden’s path to victory in November — and is quietly signaling to colleagues that she wants him off the ticket.
Worried Democratic lawmakers are apparently going to Pelosi with their concerns, hoping that she will bring them to the president, her longtime ally. “She’s the political voice of the Democratic caucus right now,” one House Democrat told Politico.
But it’s unclear whether even a push from Pelosi could move Biden. According to The Washington Post, the president appeared “resistant” when a Democratic lawmaker asked him on one of the Zoom calls if he would step aside if party elders like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Pelosi urged him to d so.
By his own account, Biden’s epistemological environment now appears so closed that it includes only himself (and, of course, “the Lord almighty”).
“Who do you listen to on deeply personal issues like the decisions whether to stay in the race or not?” NBC’s Lester Holt asked Biden in an interview on Monday.
“Me,” the president responded.
Meanwhile, the public performances put on by Biden’s most trusted adviser — Biden — continue to be unsteady. He has subjected himself to more interviews lately, but he often struggles without a script in front of him.
In the Holt interview, Biden was asked about the Secret Service director’s lack of public appearances since the Trump shooting. “Oh, I’ve heard from him,” Biden responded. The Secret Service director is a woman.
He also appeared unable to remember when Holt asked him if he had spoken with Obama since the debate. “I don’t think — I may have,” Biden responded. “I don’t think so.” According to New York Magazine, the two have spoken after the debate. The moment called to mind a similar one in Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, when he also could not remember if he had watched video of the debate performance.
And then, there was this moment, where it is briefly unclear what Biden is even saying:
Even in scripted events, Biden’s performances have also been mixed in recent days. Although he was praised for a fiery speech at a Michigan rally last week, Biden trailed off three separate times during a speech at an NAACP event yesterday. At one point, seemingly straining to read the TelePrompter, he even miscommunicated his own policy, mistakenly announcing a plan to prohibit rent increases larger than $55. The White House proposal, announced yesterday, is actually to prohibit rent increases larger than 5%.
Amid the president’s checkered public appearances, the Democratic dispute over whether to replace him on the ticket has paused for a proxy battle over the mechanics of the nomination.
Since May, Democrats have been planning to hold a virtual roll call to formalize their presidential nominee before the Chicago convention. This was originally planned in response to an Ohio ballot deadline, but after the deadline was moved, Democrats signaled that they would still move forward with the virtual roll call.
Some Biden critics have suggested that the move is a ploy to avoid a last-minute floor fight over renominating Biden, and a group of House Democrats penned a letter in protest. The fight over the virtual roll call suggests that some Democrats lawmakers are holding out hope for an 11th hour effort to dump Biden; after all, why resist the virtual roll call otherwise?
The lawmakers make this explicit in their letter, charging that a virtual roll call would “contradict what President Biden himself has repeatedly said to members of Congress in recent days, telling us that anyone who wants to challenge his nomination should do so ‘at the convention.’”
“Stifling debate and prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket through an unnecessary and unprecedented ‘virtual roll call’ in the days ahead is a terrible idea,” they added.
This morning, party officials announced a plan to move forward with a virtual roll call, but promised that it would not take place until August. (Some Democrats had worried that the roll call would be pushed into July, preventing Biden critics from having any time to organize.)
If efforts do emerge to complicate the roll call vote (whether in July or August), with Democratic lawmakers urging delegates to vote for a different nominee, Biden would likely frame it as an attempt by “elites” to oust him against the voters’ wishes, as he has done in recent days.
“Look, 14 million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic Party, okay?” he told Holt. “I listen to them.”
However, fresh evidence suggests that Democratic voters may be having second thoughts. According to an AP/NORC poll out this morning, 65% of Democrats want Biden to “withdraw and allow his party to select a different candidate.”
That’s an extraordinary, and unprecedented, finding: nearly two-thirds of a party’s voters do not want the incumbent president to be their nominee.
Add it to the list of polling data unlikely to find their way to the Oval Office.
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As always, thank you for your clear eyed reporting Gabe. It is very much needed.