NEW YORK CITY - President Joe Biden doesn't believe his current low polling reflects his actual following and the possibility that he's gaining ground across the country, a new report by Axios shows.
According to insiders, the incumbent has been telling people both in public and private that his support is steadily growing, so much so that he may even be ahead of his opponent, former president and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
"While the press doesn't write about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor, with the polls moving towards us and away from Trump," Biden told donors during a West Coast swing last week.
Biden has expressed this narrative throughout the campaign. Axios assures that his claims are not part of a public spin, but rather a genuine belief that he is ahead of his Republican counterpart.
"The polling data has been wrong all along," Biden said in a rare interview with CNN when he was confronted with his bad polling numbers. "How many— you guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks do you have to call to get one response?"
Regardless of these claims, polls and literature regarding the elections show this year's race may be a historically tight one.
For instance, a recent poll by the New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer shows the incumbent continues to trail Trump in most battleground states he won four years ago as key demographics that overwhelmingly supported him, namely Latinos, Blacks and young people, show increased levels of dissatisfaction with the administration.
In that report, Biden led Trump in only one of the six states surveyed, Wisconsin. In the remaining five battleground territories— Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan— he remains behind.
Another study by the Marist National Poll, which Biden likes to cite, shows the current president ahead. While that report still shows the elections as a tight race, it also argues that Biden is doing better than he did in 2020 among white voters, and he has eliminated the advantage that Trump had among independents earlier in the year.
Although polls are used to get a feel of what electorates are thinking, it doesn't necessarily predict the outcome of the contest. For instance, Trump over-performed polls in 2016 and 2020, while Democrats did better than expected in many 2022 midterm contests, according to Axios.
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