With roughly a week and a half to go before his sole presidential term ends, President Joe Biden sat down for an exit interview of sorts with USA Today where among the issues discussed was whether Biden believed he could have won in 2024 had he stayed in the race.
Not surprisingly, Biden said he believed he could have defeated Donald Trump based in part on polling he was allegedly looking at at the time:
Concerns about the age and acuity of America’s oldest president flared with his faltering performance in a televised debate with Trump in June. Democratic leaders who feared Trump would trounce Biden, among them former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urged him to withdraw from the race, an unprecedented step so late in the campaign.
After he reluctantly pulled out in July, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, then lost in November.
Could he have won?
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden said, adding he based that view on polling he had reviewed. He expressed no such confidence when asked whether he had the vigor to serve another four years in office, though. “I don’t know,” he replied.
As Legal Insurrection noted last month, it’s a claim Biden has made before behind closed doors to those close to him, while also expressing regret for dropping out.
“Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations,” the Washington Post reported in late December.
It was a suggestion that was strongly disputed by, among others, independent Pennsylvania journalist Salena Zito, who pointed out, for instance, that Biden was doing poorly in the Keystone State before his disastrous June presidential debate.
“No, I’m sorry it would’ve never happened,” she tweeted at the time.
“It would’ve never ever happened. He was bleeding voters in Pennsylvania demonstrably even before the debate. Anyone who spent any time on the ground reporting in my home state knows this as [true] because he had lost the working class,” Zito also wrote.
And now, as Biden goes public with the belief he could have bested Trump in November, CNN‘s expert numbers cruncher, Harry Enten, is weighing in, calling the claim “flat-out bonkers”:
“Joe Biden in his exit interview with USA Today claims that he could have beaten Donald Trump had he stayed in the race,” Enten said in the video. “So, this begs the question, could Biden have won the 2024 election had he [stayed] in the race?”“Truthfully, I categorize his statement as flat-out bonkers,” he added.
Enten went on to explain that Biden was behind Trump in all the battleground states prior to the debate, and speculated that he would have never made up for all the lost ground by November:
“The bottom line is this: Joe Biden was behind, he had always been behind and he most likely would have stayed behind,” Enten said Wednesday.
Watch:
Enten was one of the few data gurus who stayed consistent with his prognostications both before and after Biden was forced out of the race, pointing out along the way that Vice President Harris’ path to the presidency was not going to be as smooth as others in the polling/media industries were making it out to be.
Enten was right then and, in my opinion, he’s correct now. It’s hard to envision any scenario where Biden would have been able to turn things around after what the CNN debate exposed about him once and for all. The damage was just too great.
-Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter/X.-
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