President Biden’s re-election campaign tried to calm nerves and quash calls for him to exit the 2024 White House race Wednesday by firing off an all-staff memo showing the Democrat within striking distance of Donald Trump in some polls.
The memo, obtained by Politico, highlighted internal polling in battleground states before and after the first presidential debate June 27, when Biden alarmed millions of viewers over his poor performance — repeatedly losing his train of thought and struggling with what to say.
Trump and Biden were both polling at 43% before the debate, according to the internal numbers.
By Tuesday, the president had dropped to 42% while Trump improved by just 0.2%, according to Politico.
Other polls conducted after the debate have not shown Biden in as good a position against Trump.
A CBS poll released Wednesday has Trump leading across seven battleground states by 3%, while a Tuesday CNN poll had the president lagging behind his rival nationally by 6%.
The CNN poll also showed that 75% of respondents thought the Democratic Party would be better off if Biden was not the nominee.
The memo tried to quiet fears among Democrats about the numbers and also tried to do pre-emptive damage control ahead of an expected poll release by the New York Times and Siena College.
Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez stated the poll “is likely to show a slightly larger swing in the race,” but argued “we should all keep in mind that, just last week, the NYT themselves acknowledged that they are often a polling outlier.”
“We are going to see a few polls come out today [Wednesday] and we want you all to hear from us on what we know internally and what we expect to come externally,” the memo read, according to Politico. “Polls are a snapshot in time and we should all expect them to continue to fluctuate — it will take a few weeks, not a few days, to get a full picture of the race.”
Biden himself was scheduled to meet in person with Democratic governors Wednesday evening after speaking in the morning to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffires (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Biden’s team has maintained that the president has no plans to drop his 2024 bid and insisted that the debate was merely a bad night.
Tuesday night, Biden blamed his performance on his jet leg despite not leaving the Eastern time zone for nearly two weeks before the the debate.
“I decided to travel around the world a couple of times… shortly before the debate,” Biden said at a fundraiser in McLean, Va. “It wasn’t very smart [to be] traveling around the world a couple times.”
“I didn’t listen to my staff… and then I almost fell asleep on stage,” the president added.
In fact, between the evening of June 18 and the afternoon of the debate on June 27, Biden was either at his summer home at Rehoboth Beach, Del. or prepping for the debate at the presidential retreat at Camp David — leading to renewed questions about his fitness for office.
The Biden campaign did not respond to inquiries from The Post about the memo.
