A confidential polling memo circulating among anxious Democrats is confirming some of their worst fears: President Joe Biden’s support has started to tumble in key electoral battlegrounds in the wake of his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta, and Biden’s diminished standing is now putting previously noncompetitive states like New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico in play for Donald Trump. What’s more, Biden has taken such a reputational hit that he is polling behind other alternative Democratic candidates—including Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer—in hypothetical one-on-one matchups against Trump.
The memo was put together after the debate by OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit that conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign. OpenLabs is something of a black box: Their website is mostly blank, they don’t seek publicity, and their client list is closely held. But their data-driven memos are trusted in Democratic circles, and typically passed around to a small group of clients and strategists. One of those Democrats forwarded me the OpenLabs document on Tuesday morning.
The poll—conducted online in the 72 hours after the debate and emailed to interested parties on Sunday—found that 40 percent of the Biden voters in 2020 that were surveyed now believe the president should end his campaign. That represents a significant shift from their last survey in May, which showed that only a quarter of Biden 2020 voters said he should drop out. Biden is also taking a major hit among swing voters: By a 2-to-1 margin, they believe Biden should exit the race.
This is, of course, only a single poll, conducted during the initial aftershocks of the debate. It will take a few weeks to determine if Biden’s slippage in the polls is a trend and not a blip. But given their reputation inside the party and connections to Future Forward, OpenLabs is a firm that Democratic campaigns take seriously.
The poll found that Biden has dropped only slightly in the national horse race against Trump, by .08 points. That mostly squares with the public narrative from the Biden campaign in the wake of the debate, as their team has labored to calm Democratic panic over Biden’s ability to beat Trump in November. Geoff Garin, one of Biden’s top pollsters, tweeted over the weekend that the campaign’s internal polling showed that the national race was mostly unchanged. “The debate had no effect on the vote choice,” he said. “The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today.” Polls conducted immediately after the debate by CNN and FiveThirtyEight suggested similarly negligible gains for Trump nationally, with CNN reporting that “just 5 percent of respondents say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.”
But according to OpenLabs, that’s only part of the story. While the debate may have barely registered in national data, in their surveys of key Electoral College states where voters are paying closer attention to the campaign, Biden is doing noticeably worse. In a poll including third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president has fallen by around 2 points in every single core battleground—and also in states that were not even on the 2024 map last week. In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate. He has also dropped in Michigan, where he now trails Trump by 7. OpenLabs also found that he is now losing by roughly 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and by almost 9 points in Nevada.
The most worrisome angle to all this is that Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren’t considered campaign battlegrounds last week. Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico—and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points.
The survey also found that Biden is now losing in New Hampshire, news that aligns with a Saint Anselm College poll released Monday showing Trump suddenly winning the Granite State. It’s the drip-drip of polls like these that will continue to put pressure on Biden and his team in the coming weeks, even as they seek to move on from the debate, as my colleague John Heilemann astutely noted on Monday. The other signal that will be closely watched by the Biden campaign is whether senior party members, many of whom made a show of circling the wagons over the weekend, begin to break ranks. If Biden’s falling stature starts to damage Senate and House candidates down the ballot, Democrats on Capitol Hill might take their private concerns public and demand that Biden step aside before the Democratic National Convention in August.
OpenLabs—surely to the disappointment of the White House—also decided to test other possible Democratic replacements for Biden in matchups against Trump. The results were sobering. Harris, Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg all poll ahead of Biden in every battleground state. (Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, blows away Trump in her home state.) OpenLabs ran a similar survey back in September, and found no differences between any of those Democrats and Biden.
In the poll, Harris saw her favorable rating climb above Biden. As for the other would-be candidates, they obviously aren’t as well known as Biden and Harris, but OpenLabs tweaked their data to account for name recognition, extrapolating views of the lesser-known candidates to voters that don’t have an opinion using demographics and the voter file.
That adjustment was eye-opening. Whitmer and Buttigieg demonstrated serious strength against Trump in the electoral college in a two-way race, with both of them polling above 50 percent in states totaling between 260 and 301 electoral votes. Harris and Newsom, meanwhile, did not benefit from the name recognition adjustment
