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Axios has a new piece out today with the headline: Biden’s Polling Denial. It’s not spin, the article says. The President and his top advisors actually don’t believe his bad poll numbers. “That bedrock belief has informed Biden’s largely steady-as-she-goes campaign,” says Axios. The article notes yesterday’s NYT-Siena poll of swing states and another recent Bloomberg set of swing state polls as examples of bad polling numbers the White House refuses to believe, before then shifting gears to note that other polls actually show him doing significantly better.
The factual questions here aren’t terribly complicated and they’re not really the reason I note this article or write this post. Most polls currently show Biden just behind Trump in a tight race. Others show him either tied or just ahead. And there is a theory of the election that those polls, with a greater emphasis on high propensity voters and the concentrating effect of the final months of the campaign, will put Biden on top in November. I’ve tried to air these different arguments here in the Editors’ Blog. You can believe one or the other.
I note the article because of what it says about the group psychology of each party and the related and intertwined factor of how the political press treats those parties.
Think back to 2020. Donald Trump trailed Joe Biden through the entire year by numbers ranging from the middle- to high-single digits. By the standards now being applied to Democrats, Trump should have packed it in early and just turned himself in to the Bureau of Prisons and been done with it. Yet Trump and his campaign projected an air of confidence through the whole year, insisting that the polls were wrong and saying they were sure they were going to win. In the event, the outcome was substantially closer than the polls suggested.
Now, that’s Trump. He’s a pathological liar. And like many pathological liars he doesn’t so much believe his lies as not recognize the important distinction morally and cognitively healthy adults recognize between things that are true and things that are not true. I mean, he insisted he was winning even after he literally lost. So maybe you’ll say, “Okay, Josh, sure, but Trump isn’t a great example?”
Maybe not. But it’s not just Trump.
I’ve been watching elections as my job for a quarter century. Republicans always think they’re winning, except in races that are basically uncontested. I first got an inkling of this in the early era of online political betting markets back during George W. Bush’s first term. Those markets were disproportionately made up of Republicans and they consistently overstated Republican odds, for basically any race. It’s almost a rule. If a race is at all close, Republicans think they’re winning, or at least say they think they’re winning. Democrats are the reverse. And if they’re demonstrably winning, they worry that they’re not winning by enough or should be winning by more.
I think anyone who follows politics closely knows this is true — if not in absolute terms than as a universal tendency — and can confirm it by reviewing races over any span of time.
So is this good or bad? Who knows.
Some of this goes to team sports. Does the underdog team go into the Super Bowl in denial about the fact that they’re going to lose? The absurdity of the idea speaks for itself when you put it so clearly. In any competitive setting if you think you’re going to lose you will lose. You can be realistic about the odds and still have a theory of your victory.
We see a similar pattern in other kinds of campaign coverage. Back in the Biden dementia era of the campaign we had those opinion pieces saying Democrats had to stop being in denial about Biden’s age. Or stop pretending it wasn’t an issue. Or discuss it. But what is there to discuss? He’s old. No sane campaign focuses on its liabilities. You just don’t see the same kinds of press conversations about Republicans. That doesn’t mean Republicans never get bad coverage. But they seldom get that kind of bad coverage.
I think what this report suggests is that the Biden team thinks the current polls don’t capture their underlying strength. That’s likely a combination of the likely/registered voter dynamic we’ve discussed, a theory of the voting electorate which is always at least at the margins a matter of informed speculation until Election Day, and an underlying belief about the trajectory of the final months as voters are increasingly focused on the binary choice between the two men. Will their theory turn out to be true? Who knows. I really hope it’s true. And I think there are good reasons to think it is. But it’s not a crazy thought and if you’re running the campaign what else are you going to think?
For all the reasonable explanations of why the post-Dobbs pattern of Democrats over-performing in elections won’t apply to 2024, it’s still a pattern. Is it so nuts to think that the pattern of 2022, 2023 and the great majority of special elections won’t apply in 2024? General elections are different from off-year elections. So I don’t think we can assume it. But it’s hardly a crazy idea.
As I said above, my point here isn’t to argue what appears to be the Biden team’s theory of the case. It’s to note the reality that Republicans almost always think they’re winning, if the objective evidence makes it even remotely possible. And Democrats tend to assume or fear defeat — and say as much — unless polls consistently show them crushing their rivals. Not only is this the case, but I think it’s so clearly the case that it’s actually one of the assumptions we bring to our understanding of politics. We assume Democrats think that way and that Republicans think the other way. And that, to a significant degree, is why reporters and the press generally act in the way they do.