Pollercoaster with Dan Pfeiffer - Preview | Trump leading Biden?

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Hey, it's Dan Pfeiffer. The Kirkland staff is off enjoying their last moments of rest before 2024 hits.

So today we're bringing you a special preview of my brand new

Crooked subscriber-exclusive podcast series, Polar Coaster.

Polar Coaster is my chance to sit down with expert guests who break down the latest polls,

unpack what they actually mean, and decide whether it's time to completely freak out.

The full first episode is already available to our subscriber community.

But if this preview piques your interest, head over to crooked.com slash friends to learn more and sign up. Happy holidays, everyone.
Welcome to Polar Coaster. Today, I'm joined by Cornell Belcher, the founder and president of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies, an NBC political analyst, a pollster for President Obama, and the author of the book, A Black Man in the White House.
Cornell Belcher, welcome to the Polar Coaster. Thanks for having me on the Polar Coaster, I think.
Well, you know where Polar Coaster comes from. It's when it is in 2011, 12, when people like our mutual friend, Jon Favreau, would be freaking out about every individual Gallup poll.
David Plouffe, our campaign manager in 2008 and White House senior advisor in 2011-2012, would tell him to get off the fucking Polar Coaster. And so we have taken that brand because it is a wild and nauseating ride.
And we've applied it to this brand new podcast here at Kirkland Media. So I love that, by the way.
I remember Plough used to say, we're not going to play the polling game. That's right.
That's right. And had this back and forth with all the reporters about every single poll, which is exactly what they continue to do now.
Which is why he's probably deeply disappointed in me for starting a podcast entirely about the polls. So here we are.
All right. We are less than one year out from the 2024 election.
and every day seems to bring another incredibly alarming poll showing Donald Trump surging and Joe Biden sinking.

Just this weekend, we woke up to a new Wall Street Journal poll showing Trump leading Biden by six points.

This is the first time Trump has ever led Biden in a single Wall Street Journal poll.

And at 38 percent, the president now has his lowest approval rating to date.

All really fun stuff. In this first ever episode of Polar Coaster, I just want to take a moment to put the polls this far out from the election in perspective and give people a sense of how to think about them.
Crinnell, how do you think about polls this far out? Do they matter at all? How do you think? How do you use them? There's a couple different ways, right? Polling is a really insider thing. My biggest gripe about the mainstream media right now is they're using polls to drive stories and narrative.
And it's lazy. You know, I was doing Meet the Press this past weekend, and, you know, we spent all this time talking about polls.
And what's missing in the conversation is, you know, and it's not beating up on just the television media, but newspapers as well. But my criticism here is more broad because every story that we run about a poll where we're like, you know, making polling and the horse race something enticing, it's like what we've done with cooking.
Like we have all these cooking competitions and all of a sudden cooking has become like a spectator sport. We'd be doing a much better service to our listeners and our readers if in fact we told them what the difference is between the candidates on issues that matter as opposed to saying, you know, Donald head's a head ahead in this state or Biden's ahead in this state.
Why not talk to them about what the implications of a Trump or Biden presidency would mean to them on a number of issues? So that's my broad complaint about so much polling because I think it's become lazy. The other part here is, and why the average person shouldn't be paying a lot of attention to polling.

Because the least important number in a poll, Dan, is a horse race number.

And we always – we want the polls to predict the future.

They're not.

If you take the polling at 2011 at the same time in 2011, and you know this well, Dan, because we spend a lot of time beating up reporters on this.

Barack Obama was behind in New York Times polling.

And they were writing articles about, is Barack Obama toast? And there's op-eds literally saying Barack Obama shouldn't run again because he's showing so poorly in the polls. Well, fast forward, you know he won back-to-back majorities.
What polling for us, from a campaign standpoint, is polling identifies what our problems and our opportunities are. I think there are a couple things that are important.
And this is sort of one of the founding principles of this podcast, is that every person who cares a lot about this election is very nervous and rightfully freaked out about the idea that Donald Trump can win, wants the polls to tell us what's going to happen. That's not what they're for.
That's not what a campaign uses them for. It's not even really what the media uses them for.
What they are is they're telling us where things are right now. And you can believe in your head that Joe Biden has a very real path to winning.
And I think we'll talk a little bit about how the numbers show that to happen. And he's in a not great place right now.
And I think the Biden campaign, a lot of folks say historically incumbents are losing in the off year, right? Even Ronald Reagan was tied with Walter Mondale in 1983. Bill Clinton was tied with Bob Dole in 1995.
Obama was tied or losing to a generic Republican in 2011. I think, but if we want to be like perfectly frank with people, there are some flaws in the Biden-Obama comparisons in In both in 84 and 83 and 95, there was like one polls, and then the incumbents jumped out to large leads, which they never surrendered for the entire time.
In the infamous Nate Silver trolley headline that said Obama has a 17% chance of winning was written in November. But even at that point, by the time Nate Silver had written it, Obama had both in a lot of public polls pulled ahead of Romney, in part because the Republican primary, if you remember, engaged in those debates in the fall where they were booing gay service members, the audience was.
Every one of the Republican candidates said that they would rather basically cut the entire federal budget

than raise taxes $1 on a single rich person.

And by the time we got to here, we're recording this in early December,

Obama had actually sort of come back to sort of bounce back to a decent place,

like not all the way there.

But so Biden is behind where Obama was. It doesn't mean he won't be in a better place.
It's a very different race. It's a different Democratic coalition.
And that's another point about the polar coaster is you do six or seven different polls depending on, and I think this is important for the viewers here, depending on the poll, you don't know what that universe is. right? There's a conversation out there right now about CNN's polling, and they have an oversample of showing Biden's not doing as well among young people.
That's really different than Harvard's IOP poll that has a large swath of young people that show he's not completely cratering. We kind of got to get in the weeds here.
When polling is wrong these days, Dan, it's not because of the science of polling. And I know there's a lot of back and forth about cell phones and how you reach people.
But the truth of the matter is, Dan, I have an ability to reach more diverse, younger segments of the electorate today than I did when we were trying to elect John Kerry. Because today I can actually reach that 22-year-old Latina walking around the campus of UNLV.
I have an ability to reach her today in a way I just could not, we could not, and when John Kerry was running for office. And so the challenges today really isn't about the science of it, because the science is still sound, right? And it's still based on the theory of randomness, right? That everyone in that universe has the same probability of a likelihood of being selected.
So the theory of randomness is still working fairly well, even though it's particularly with so much of our polling being done on cell phones. That said, when polling is wrong, it's not the science.
It's the art. And good polling is both a science and an art.
Every poll is based on an assumption of what they think the electorate's going to look like. How many Republicans? How many Democrats? How many young people? How many black voters? Latino voters are going to turn out.
And if you guess wrong, then you're going to be completely off. And there's a very famous or infamous article that Nate Cohen of the New York Times did back in, I think it was 2020, where he gave three different pollsters the raw New York Times Siena data and told them to say what they thought the head-to-head race between Biden and Trump was.
And you got three radically different views. And in 2020 and 2016, the pollsters universally, media pollsters, independent university pollsters, pollsters for the campaigns guessed wrong.
They underestimated turnout among Trump voters in both of those elections, which is why you get media polls showing Biden winning by 10 in Wisconsin two weeks before the election and Biden winning by less than a half percent or whatever that ended up being. So that's a very important point.
Biden is underperforming, particularly among what I call that Obama continuum of voters, that Democrats absolutely do not get to a majority without this younger, more diverse cohort of voters who, you know, in our data, you know, Obama still has a thermometer among them in the 70s. But Democrats have a thermometer in the, you know, 48 thermometer.
Obama has a 70 thermometer with them. But again, from a campaign standpoint, great.
I understand where my problem is. And now I'm going to build a campaign and strategy to solve for that problem.

And I think what you're going to see over the next couple of weeks, couple of months, and they've actually begun to do it already, is building a strategy to solve for that problem. In the Wall Street Journal poll, and this is consistent with the sort of infamous Times-Siena poll that everyone's been talking about, but basically every poll is similar, is that Trump has big advantages on the economy, immigration, crime, inflation, if they break that question out, and Biden generally has advantages on abortion and democracy and climate change, if they ask that question as well.
No president, no one has won a modern, a presidential election in modern history without at least breaking even on the economy question. How important do you think it is for Biden to do that, to improve there? And what advice would you give them to make those gains? I push back on that a little bit because it's about how you define the economy.
Again, we'll go back to grounds that we're most comfortable with, right. There is, is, you know, an, an early polling on the, on the question of, you know, who would do a better job on the economy.
Mitt Romney had a huge advantage over Barack Obama. Mitt Romney was a businessman.
He had a huge advantage over Barack Obama on, on who would do better on, on the economy, who would do better at creating jobs. But where, where there was an opportunity for Obama, and then we pressed pressed it was, well, who's going to fight for you? Who's going to fight for the middle class? Who's going to fight for people like you? Mitt Romney may be, in fact, be good at sort of the economy and understand the economy as a business person, but he's not going to use his business acumen, his knowledge to fight for people like you.
He's going to fight for people like him, right? So that is a trade-off. And look, going back to when I was doing work for Dean at the DNC, Republicans have this advantage on sort of the generic economy, but Democrats have to drive and open up an advantage on fighting for people like you and fighting for the middle class and fighting for working class people.
And I think that's where the opportunity for Biden is because look, he is blue collar middle class. So I think in the end, I'm not worried about a generic economy question where Trump has advantage.
I'm not surprised he has advantage as a wealthy businessman, that he has advantage that people think that he knows business and the economy. But in the end, I think the contrast is going to have to be who's fighting for people like you, who's going to be on the side of people like you.
And so it comes down to how do you define the terms of the debate, right? If the debate is simply about who's going to be generically better on the economy, we don't want that debate. We want the debate to be about, in the end, middle America, who's going to be on your side? Is it going to be Donald Trump? Is he going to be on the side of wealthy people like himself? Are they going to be on the side of giving tax breaks to big corporations and making sure big corporations don't pay their fair share? Or is Joe Biden who's going to be on your side? And I think that is the economic terms of the debate that from the Democratic standpoint, you want to define the terms of the debate along.
And then again, to your point about where we have advantages and disadvantages, I'll tell you what Nicole Wallace of the Bush White House said to me. On Election Day, the top issue is going to be what we determine the top issue going to be.
Here's another thing that has a lot of Democrats freaked out. So 538 does, has average pool ratings for Biden, Trump, Obama in at this point in their presidency.
So here's where recent presidents are, right? Jimmy Carter was, had a plus two net approval. So if you understand net approval is your approval minus your disapproval, right? So he was two points more approved than disapproved.
Barack Obama at this point was minus 3.4%. Donald Trump was at minus 11.9%.
And Biden is sitting here at minus 18%. How much of that is about Biden? How much is about polarization? Does it concern you, but all that Biden's below where Trump was at this point? What I'm most anxious about are these millennial voters.
I'm not, these millennial voters where he's got to do 20 points better among these younger voters than what he's currently doing in the polls. And again, it's a snapshot, right? I'm not freaked out about that.
As a campaign professional, I see where the problem is, and then I know where the target and focus the campaign's time, resources, and attention at. And right now, young people, and particularly now, because of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, young voters are particularly not happy where they see, at least in polling data that I'm seeing, where they do think that America and the administration is not doing enough to help the Palestinians.
And it's not that they're against Israel, but they think that this is a really lopsided, one-sided affair and not enough is being done to help the Palestinians who they think are suffering. But on the end, the vast, vast majority of voters in America don't go into the voting booth thinking about foreign policy.
They go into a voting booth thinking about a whole array of domestic issues that are a lot closer to home. I think we should end this on a positive note.
We do, because we are going to drive this roller coaster metaphor into the ground, we try to take the polls or the state of the polling in the moment

we're in and rate it on a nausea scale of one to 10. I'd love to hear where you are.
My sense is

you're closer to one than 10 based on this, but what's your sense of where we are?

Thanks for checking out this special sneak preview of Polar Coaster. To hear the rest

and future episodes, plus a ton of other great exclusive content, consider joining the Friends

of the Pod subscriber community. Visit crooked.com slash friends to learn more.
The best cars for the money are Hondas. Save big with 0% financing.
The 25 Accord Civic Passport and Odyssey have been named the best cars for the money by U.S. News and World Report.
Save thousands with 0%, like the 24 Prologue with 0 APR. To drive the best, ask anyone who owns a Honda and search your local Honda dealer.
See dealer for financing details. Financing on credit approval.
Offer ends 4-30-25. View U.S.
News best cars at cars.usnews.com. As a business owner, you wear a lot of hats.
One minute you're ordering today's inventory, and the next you're planning tomorrow's expansion. It's complicated, but your business credit card should be simple.
With the Signify Business Cash Card by Wells Fargo, you earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases for your business with no caps or categories to track.

Signify Business Cash, the deliberately simple business credit card.

Learn more at wellsfargo.com slash signify. Terms apply.