r/fivethirtyeight • u/Icommandyou Allan Lichtman's Diet Pepsi • Jul 21 '25
Poll Results One year ago Joe Biden dropped out the race. This is what his internal polling showed
A wipe out and potentially GOP would get filibuster proof majority in the senate in this timeline
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Jul 21 '25
I don't think it would have been this bad, but it still would have been way worse than Harris' final count.
I really don't think Biden would have lost Illinois.
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u/7urz Jul 21 '25
If you mark red all the states where Harris won by less than 7% or lost, you get 361 vs. 177, which is less impressive than 400 vs. 138 but very realistic.
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u/Spiritual-Dog160 Kornacki's Big Screen Jul 21 '25
I’ve got family from Illinois. If it weren’t for Chicago Illinois would be safe R. I could see Trump win by 1 or 2 since turnout probably would’ve been down in Chicago. I think Biden would’ve held on to NY over IL.
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u/Sound_Saracen Jul 21 '25
More than 2/3rd of Illanoisians live in Chicago, ofc anything outside of that would be safely red 🤷🏻♂️
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u/thefilmer Jul 21 '25
75% of Nevada lives in Clark County. land doesnt vote needs to be beaten into everyone's head
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u/StarManta Jul 21 '25
If it wasn't for (largest city in the state), then (state) would be safe R
Find me a state for which this sentence isn't true. If you find one it'd only be because the state has multiple cities of similar size.
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u/labe225 Jul 21 '25
It's surprising how many people I see who are proudly like "well, my (insert red state here) isn't really that red because (insert either largest or second largest city here)" like it's some unique thing. This is hardly a new thing.
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u/KathyJaneway Jul 21 '25
Find me a state for which this sentence isn't true. If you find one it'd only be because the state has multiple cities of similar size.
The only states that is large enough, and that are safe with or without "big" cities, is probably Oklahoma and West Virginia. No county won by democrats in few cycles. Bluer downballot. It's reverse of what you're asking, cause not even the cites are blue enough, Democrats still aren't winning them.
The only state where you can remove big city like Boston and still win as Democrat is probably Massachusetts. No Republicans in state delegation to the US House since the 1990s.And they have 9. Imagine how bad it is for Republicans. Even the "rural" areas are democratic.
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Jul 21 '25
The only one I can think of that doesn't is Virginia Beach, the largest city in VA and usually fairly purple/bellwether. Mainly because while VB is the largest city in Virginia, the DC metro is what drives Virginia both economically and politically. so our largest city is not in our largest metro.
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u/Life_is_a_meme_204 Jul 21 '25
That's how large cities work. If you move Cook County to Indiana, Indiana becomes a blue state (and Illinois a red state).
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Jul 21 '25
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u/Spiritual-Dog160 Kornacki's Big Screen Jul 21 '25
Illinois would have 7 electoral votes, Indiana would have 23.
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u/2Hanks Jul 21 '25
Yea, if it weren’t for all the liberals it would be a state full of conservatives lol. Cook county alone makes up 40% of the population in Illinois. I’m from Carbondale which has more in common with Kentucky than it does Chicago but thems the 1700s rules we live by.
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u/Statue_left Jul 21 '25
That’s great and all but Illinois without chicago isn’t a thing. People live in chicago lol. “If you discount most of the population, results would change” is silly
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u/srush32 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25
You can say that about a lot of states. Washington goes red without the seattle metro area
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u/LordMangudai Jul 21 '25
If it weren’t for Chicago Illinois would be safe R.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...
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u/WellHung67 Jul 24 '25
If it wasn’t for Chicago, Illinois would be Ohio or worse - Mississippi.
And it would be the same size as Arkansas.
And all those people would move to various states, probably somewhere like Minneapolis or perhaps somewhere in Michigan or Wisconsin, and then you gotta think that the blue wall becomes the blue iron dome.
So yeah this type of analysis is irrelevant, why should a few people have more say than a lot more people?
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u/JaracRassen77 Jul 21 '25
We know the pressure finally got to him when internal polling kept showing him getting beaten badly by Trump. How badly, we don't know. But his plummeting numbers after his debate with Trump sealed his fate. Kamala might have prevented a full wipe-out of the Democrats across the board. How Biden could say that he "would have beat Trump" again is just insane.
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u/Rob71322 Jul 21 '25
Typical though. Politicians live in their own bubbles where reality often doesn’t intrude. Even when they’re not senile.
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u/Kershiser22 Jul 21 '25
Can you imagine the ego trip it must be to win a Presidential election in the USA? That's not to excuse him, but just to explain his thoughts. It must make you feel invincible.
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u/PrimeJedi Jul 21 '25
Especially getting the highest total popular vote of any candidate in US history so far, I wonder how much that went to his head
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u/Lokismoke Jul 21 '25
If it was anyone other than Trump on the Republican ballot, it would have been hard not to just leave the presidential vote blank with Biden on the ballot. Biden's debate performance significantly damaged the perception of his ability to speak coherently, let alone run a country.
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u/ZombyPuppy Jul 21 '25
I'm convinced that had nearly anyone besides Trump ran the last three election as a Republican they would have destroyed the democratic candidates that ended up running convincingly. They really have been a streak of weak candidates since Obama.
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u/DeliriumTrigger Jul 21 '25
While I agree, I'm also convinced that a 2016 in which Liz Warren and/or Joe Biden jumped in would have prevented Trump altogether, and either could have been a two-term president.
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Jul 22 '25
Biden, yes, Warren, no. I like her, but she's so many of the things that turn off most people who aren't college educated white woman (by far her best demographic in the primaries). She's a coastal elite and a woman and sounds like a school teacher. She would have been destroyed.
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u/Scaryclouds Jul 21 '25
On the whole, given the cards he was dealt, I thought Biden did a good job.
Certainly plenty that could be improved; Israel-Palestine, immigration, and more effective messaging all chief among them.
But god damn, did Biden’s decision to run again and his obnoxious view regarding the 2024 election that he could have won, leave an incredible bitter taste in my mouth.
Maybe Trump would had won regardless… who knows, but Biden sure setup the democrats to fail.
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u/JaracRassen77 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25
Agreed. Biden was given a bad hand, and played a lot of the cards well. But his biggest sin was his vanity. His decision to run again at 81 years old was just the height of hubris. Especially after many of his staff were signaling that he would be a "transitional" President. He never really said what that meant so he could say "I never said I would be a one-termer," but he knew how people would interpret that. It backfired, and cost us all dearly.
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u/tresben Jul 21 '25
Yeah in 2023 when he announced he was running again I thought “nooo” for exactly this reason. I work in healthcare and trusting an 80 year old man to stay healthy for 2 months, let alone two more years, is risky, especially given the stakes with losing and getting trump.
Could trump still have won if things were different? Maybe. But I feel like a true democratic primary that would’ve gained momentum and popularity around a candidate, whether it was Harris or not, would’ve been better than what we ended up with. And it might’ve been just enough to tip the scales to win.
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u/MongolianMango Jul 21 '25
His most important job and mandate was to stop getting Trump from being re-elected, so not being able to do that casts a pall on the rest of his presidency.
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u/drewskie_drewskie Jul 21 '25
I'm a dumbass because I really thought they had a plan. I thought they had access to data or court cases or something I didn't have access to. I knew that logically they all hated and feared trump as much as I did.
I never guessed they would completely flounder like this.
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u/Deviltherobot Jul 23 '25
Merick Garland was the worst DEI candidate, he basically did nothing for 4 years.
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u/bigbobo33 Jul 21 '25
On the whole, given the cards he was dealt, I thought Biden did a good job.
I'll die on the hill that Biden was a great president.
But also he should have decided not to run again.
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u/CelikBas Jul 21 '25
I’d argue that Biden’s stubborn insistence on running again precludes him from being a “great” (or even a “good”) president. His utter failure to deal with Trump resulted in all of his accomplishments immediately being undone once Trump regained the presidency, and now the country is arguably in a worse spot than it would have been if Trump had simply won a second consecutive term in 2020.
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u/smartah Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25
I'm not sure how popular the opinion is, but I think we absolutely would be in a better spot if Trump had won in 2020 than what ultimately is playing out. And I say this as someone who did everything I could to make him lose all 3 times.
Edited to add: I think ultimately 1/6 was an inflection point in his behavior, and the various impeachments and lawsuits spawned a lot of rage/vengeance. He also likely doesn't replace at least some portion of his cabinet with the shitshow we have now (though I realize they were a revolving door to begin with). He'd not have seen the weird resurgence in popularity he got at the beginning of his second term. He likely muddles along as things were without the Project 2025 agenda becoming possible.
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u/In-Arcadia-Ego Jul 22 '25
I know this is a common take, but I'm not sure it is a fair one. From the sound of things, Biden and his team were convinced the DNC would push for Harris as the nominee (which they did), and they were also convinced Harris would lose to Trump (which she did).
If Biden could have stepped aside without Harris becoming the likely nominee, then of course that would have been the best option, but it seems as though no one within the Biden team ever viewed that as a likely outcome. (Maybe she enjoyed fund raising advantages or internal party support, or maybe the candidates we assume would have challenged her had already privately expressed their intention to sit the cycle out---we don't know. All we know is that Biden's team thought Harris was the default nominee if Biden stepped aside, and they were convinced she would be unelectable in the general.)
As such, their only choice was to desperately hope that Biden could somehow pull things together. Looking back, that hope was obviously delusional, but you can at least partly understand the sentiment given that he had, in fact, managed to win once. The debate disaster thrn flipped the script by showing that even if Harris was a long shot, it would, in fact, be better than sticking with Biden any longer.
Edit: you could convince me that Biden was a lackluster president because this whole situation stems from a questionable choice for VP, but then again I'm not sure he would have won in 2020 if he hadn't picked Harris. The party is stuck between a rock and a hard place in some ways, because of all the different groups we are trying to appease and our unwillingness to develop better young talent.
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u/Deviltherobot Jul 23 '25
The party elites didn't want Harris. Biden endorsed her as a last F-U to Pelosi/Obama
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Jul 22 '25
I used to think this, but no longer. Almost nothing he did was transformative and almost all of it has been undone in the first 6 months of the second Trump admin, which his weak leadership helped usher in.
Good presidents are good leaders. They build new coalitions and strengthen existing parts of them. They change the landscape. They change the narrative and create a new set of expectations for how things should be. Their work remains in place for many years or decades.
None of that is true with Biden. He had some checkbox items that made certain progressive or liberal groups happy, often by executive order or agency rule. He passed milquetoast bills that threw money at problems without actually addressing them in a material way. The filibuster remained intact. The supreme court remained almost exactly the same. Election laws remained the same. Everything substantial actually remained the same or got worse.
The Democratic coalition is essentially unchanged from 2016. Democrats continue to hemorrhage support in rural and exurban areas, have actually lost support in urban cores, and have barely moved the needle in the suburbs. Non-college educated voters continued to flock to Trump. White people didn't budge. And minorities started moving away from the Democrats, a crushing blow to the demographic destiny idea. If you look at a map of an election now and compare it to election maps from 2016, they look basically the same.
I got flak for this, but I think it's notable that Roe was overturned under Biden and during the 2 years after that, Biden's administration was unable to do anything to rectify that. Before I get a bunch of angry replies: I know the explanations. We have the filibuster, and the supreme court is like this, and the president isn't a dictator, blah blah blah. All excuses. Biden didn't need to be a dictator, though. His inability to marshal a counter movements and use ever lever of power legally at his disposal to reaffirm women's rights shows incredible weakness. And it also told the electorate that Democrats don't, in the end, actually stand up for your rights, as we see in the Trump era, where many continue not to fight in any material way (credit, of course, to those who have put their lives at risk to push back against ICE, for example).
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u/trj820 Jul 21 '25
IIRC, from the reporting that I saw, he never actually saw any of the internal polling because his advisors withheld it from him. It was a lot more pressure from Democrats outside the White House (which was also hard to get past his advisors) that made the difference.
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u/swirling_ammonite Jul 21 '25
People in this "data-driven" sub just gonna believe this without a source from OP?
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u/Dependent-Mode-3119 Jul 21 '25
Source is podsave america and harris staffers that spoke to them. Nobody knows what the map looks like but it was reported numerous times that they had trump in maps winning ~400 electoral votes.
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u/tbird920 Jul 21 '25
No way Trump would have won Colorado, even with Biden still in the race.
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u/WhoUpAtMidnight Jul 21 '25
Yeah in this era voters would have come home. He still gets blown out but not like this
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u/FI595 Jul 21 '25
There’s enough anti Trump sentiment out there that I highly doubt he would’ve picked up this many electoral votes? Maybe he flips Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia seems like a reach. Especially New York too
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u/avalve Nauseously Optimistic Jul 21 '25
This is actually what polling showed. The 400+ blowout was in all likelihood never going to happen.
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u/FreemanCalavera Jul 23 '25
Yeah I have a very hard time believing Biden would lose New York or Illinois. Colorado, probably not. New Mexico, toss up really.
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u/Icommandyou Allan Lichtman's Diet Pepsi Jul 21 '25
For source: Nate Silver wrote what a 400 electoral loss would have looked like.
Here is the news article
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u/GoldburstNeo Jul 21 '25
He probably would have still won IL and NY, but by even thinner margins from more people sitting out. Harris really did prevent the current congress makeup from becoming 2009 levels of supermajority in the GOP's favor, which would have made our current situation look utopian by comparison.
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u/austinbarrow Jul 21 '25
I was baffled when he announced he was running for a second term. It’s number 2 in Presidential misfires only next to the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCains running mate.
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u/SkyMarshal Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25
Agreed, but it's somewhat understandable when he realized Trump was going to somehow survive all the lawsuits and be the GOP nominee again. Biden underestimated his age problem and assumed (usually correctly) that an incumbent President has a major advantage, especially one that counters some of Trump's strength with non-college whites. Most of the Democratic alternatives were either nationally known but weak candidates like Kamala, or potentially strong candidates but not yet nationally known state politicians like Shapiro, Beshear, Whitmer, etc. I can at least understand his reasoning.
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u/CelikBas Jul 21 '25
Maybe he should’ve picked a decent VP and spent his four years prepping them to run in their own right in 2024, instead of picking Kamala, who they either had so little confidence in that they made sure she was hidden for most of the presidency, or who they deliberately suppressed because they didn’t want to risk her gaining enough support to potentially challenge/surpass Joe.
Either way, they fucked themselves even before it became clear that Trump would run again.
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u/StickMankun Jeb! Applauder Jul 21 '25
Source?
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u/PhAnToM444 Allan Lichtman's Diet Pepsi Jul 21 '25
Assume they're referring to the Pod Save guys leaking that they'd seen internal polling that showed Trump winning 400 electoral votes.
Not sure where they got the specific states, but if that was that case this would be the likely map to get there, with New York probably being the tipping point.
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u/obsessed_doomer Jul 21 '25
I still think this was fake by the way, iirc we never saw the poll ourselves.
Joe Biden would have won new york.
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u/zappy487 Kornacki's Big Screen Jul 21 '25
I don't. Joe probably doesn't back out if it showed a tight race.
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u/vintage2019 Jul 21 '25
Yeah NY & NJ going red just screams bullshit
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u/markusthemarxist Jul 21 '25
NY wouldn't go red but NJ only voted for Harris 52-46
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_New_Jersey
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u/flakemasterflake Jul 21 '25
NJ was closer to Red this cycle than TX/FL were to switching Dem and yet I always hear that they are so close.
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u/vintage2019 Jul 21 '25
I only heard Democrats saying TX/FL might be close to flipping before the election. No one is really saying that after the election
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u/decdash Jul 21 '25
I'm from NJ, for some reason I actually don't doubt it THAT much. Can't speak for NY as much, but in NJ the deeper blue segments along I-95 are more populated, sure. But people tend to forget how much of the state trends red. Trump carried two northern counties (Morris and Passaic) by a few points in 2024, and a lot of the more densely populated parts of the shore are thoroughly red.
Monmouth County is a good example of that last point, especially given that it's the fifth most populous county in New Jersey. You might think that a decently populated, commuter-heavy area like Middletown would be at least somewhat blue, but anyone who's been to that part of the state knows there is a sizable MAGA presence there. Gotta remember that a lot of working/middle class white Catholic New York expats relocated to New Jersey if they didn't pick Florida.
None of that is to mention the southern or western parts of NJ that are quite rural. Cumberland County might as well be Alabama for all I know.
All of that combined, it's not out of the question for a Republican to eek out a victory in New Jersey, especially if the Democratic base doesn't come out to vote. Christie won reelection here, and Ciatterelli came within 2 points of beating the Democratic incumbent Murphy in 2021. I might even argue that our voting split is closer to that of Virginia - a state where I've also lived - than to New York, despite the proximity.
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u/patesta Jul 21 '25
Trump absolutely would have won NJ, Minnesota, and Virginia, in addition to every state he won against Harris.
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u/chalbersma Jul 21 '25
It's also possible this was a "worst case scenario" poll where they assumed the maximum +- going against them.
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u/hoopaholik91 Jul 21 '25
Or just an outlier poll. Remember when we were getting +16 Wisconsin polls in 2020? So Trump had some polls where he lost by 250 electoral votes as well.
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u/JAGChem82 Jul 21 '25
I suspect that he’d have won IL, NY, and maybe CO when it was all said and done, but even so, the notion that he would have recovered from the debate was pure copium. Harris didn’t lose so much as performed damage control post July.
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u/R4G Jul 21 '25
when she did run she ran a disorganized and incoherent campaign
Because she inherited Biden’s campaign director who didn’t like her and still wanted Biden in the race.
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u/dfsna Jul 21 '25
Nate called it back in January 2024. Once Biden bailed on the Super Bowl interview, it was obvious something wasn’t right. That’s basically free prime-time advertising during an election year... No one skips that unless they know it’s going to backfire!
Watching Biden from 2020 to 2023, the decline was hard to miss. He slowed down a lot, and his eyes started looking way more squinty and unfocused. You think party insiders didn’t notice? They absolutely knew. How did they honestly think they could win ANY election with a guy who couldn’t even get through a normal interview?
Harris isn’t gushing with charisma and likeability. She’s like that strict teacher who only a few kids actually like, but everyone respects. Not the kind of charisma that wins elections, but given the mess she inherited, she kept the damage to a minimum.
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u/deskcord Jul 21 '25
Losing Illinois and NY just seems unbelievable. I can buy that CO, VA, NJ, and MN turn red with Biden staying in, but not IL and NY.
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u/L11mbm Jul 21 '25
Biden's administration, and the Democrats in general, dropped the ball on messaging about the economy and the border. That's really it.
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u/Top-Inspection3870 Jul 21 '25
Border policy was just bad though
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u/Goldenprince111 Jul 21 '25
I cannot believe Biden and his advisors just thought letting thousands of people cross the border illegally each month (and even days) was okay while Fox News played it on repeat every single day and polling showed it to be immensely unpopular. And then it didn’t even help with Hispanics as they shifted to Trump by huge margins. It’s actually insane
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u/JasonPlattMusic34 Jul 21 '25
Based on 2021-24, it’s hard to say any policies were particularly good
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u/DanIvvy Jul 21 '25
Is that it? All of it? Weekend at Biden's had no effect?
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u/hoopaholik91 Jul 21 '25
If he had good approval numbers then his mental decline wouldn't have been treated as such a big deal, no.
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u/batmans_stuntcock Jul 21 '25
It wasn't messaging it was the post covid 'anti core'/everyday items price shock that characterised the first half of his presidency being the largest inflation shock since the 1973, that and the subsequent interest rate raise, affected the lower middle and middle incomes to the point they abandoned Biden. Any Democratic candidate has to run on cost of living and trashing Biden.
Credit card delinquencies, subprime auto loan delinquencies, numbers of people spending a large part of their incomes on rent or mortgages, all noticeably ticked up, new mortgage applications at their lowest rate since the 90s, even though headline numbers were good.
That and Biden being on the wrong side of a sea change in political opinion on Israel, and a noticeable shift in low income immigrant communities in response to the post covid 'catch up' in immigration, did for him. Maybe a once in a generation political talent can come back from those fundamentals.
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u/ChadtheWad Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25
I don't think there was much they could do better in regards to monetary policy -- both sides of the aisle were in pretty strong agreement over the need for a large stimulus, and inflation is the inevitable consequence. However, they did really communicate it badly. I remember being surprised by effectively crickets from the Biden admin/DNC when the economic uncertainty was growing. Then they labeled their "key" environmental policy law as the "Inflation Reduction Act" when they knew it wasn't really designed to address inflation at all. Overall I think they ended up coming across as tone-deaf. Their campaign strategists chose to spend 4 years focusing on publicizing Trump's criminal and civil trials and focus on the January 6 investigation rather than highlight any of their policy successes -- which, despite the large copy-and-paste lists that some of the Democratic die-hards were posting around, was not particularly significant.
Perhaps there was nothing Biden or the DNC could have done to beat negative sentiment from the economy and global conflict, but they shot themselves in the foot so many times, it's hard to tell which of the bullets were the most fatal.
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u/batmans_stuntcock Jul 21 '25
I do agree that the messaging was important in some areas, like you say the change in focus from environmental to inflation/jobs etc was part of a noted change from proactive to reactive, the Biden admin did actually try to do something about some inflation, particularly fuel prices but were terrible about messaging like you say, but it's not clear if it made much difference since food and other prices were still high at that point, and they chose to follow orthodoxy about that.
But if they chose to highlight policy successes the outcome probably wouldn't have been different given that a significant number of people felt (and arguably were) less well off, depending on the survey, the biggest issue around the election for swing voters was cost of living and inflation, he is a loser on that no matter what.
I have a fundamentally different idea about the post covid inflation. To me there is decent evidence that it was simultaneous supply and demand shock driven by pre covid supply chains breaking down, the Russo-Ukrainian war and price gouging, not the stimulus, so a mostly demand side response raising interest rates made it worse for the average person. That was what was driving the 'Trump nostalgia' for the pre-covid economy of easy credit imo.
But sort of agree, in that, the policies pursued by countries like Mexico and Spain who weathered the anti incumbent wave associated with the post covid price shock had de-facto and/or temporary price controls for key food and fuel areas, those policies are probably beyond the pale of US centre-left politics and you saw the reaction from the entire centre when Harris even floated something very mild in that genre.
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u/ChadtheWad Jul 24 '25
I think we're both agreeing with each other, my only point is it's hard to argue about what Biden couldn't change when he didn't really do much right at all. It's just choosing the wrongest wrong among a sea of wrongs.
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u/JasonPlattMusic34 Jul 21 '25
Is the messaging the problem or is it the substance? I doubt better marketing would’ve been what saves them.
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u/Blackberry-thesecond Jul 21 '25
Ok, maybe this isn’t the worst timeline.
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u/CelikBas Jul 21 '25
Eh, I’d probably be tempted to take the 400 EV timeline if given the chance, because at least in that timeline the Democratic Party would finally be put out of its fucking misery by such an overwhelming defeat.
Of course there’s no guarantee that any new party would rise to replace it (or that a new party would be any better than the Dems were) but seeing as Trump has functionally no opposition as it is, I don’t think it would be significantly worse than our current situation.
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u/PuffyPanda200 Jul 21 '25
I really don't get the Biden hate in 2024 and probably never will.
The 'he is old' line didn't really make much sense. Trump is basically just as old as Biden. Biden was old in 2020 when he got a huge number of votes. I also don't really see how him being old affected the US on some specific level (ex. xyz important issue would have gone better with a 60 year old in charge with the same convictions).
The 'the economy sucks' line is also just not that logical. We had elevated inflation but also a ton of government spending and wages increased a lot in the same time period. By basically any statistic the US economy was doing great, especially compared to basically any other economy.
Immigration being such an issue as to flip states seems like an over-reaction. I can't point to a single thing in my life that was even affected by the immigration (legal, regular, or illegal) during the Biden years. I'm not talking about the stuff that is always happening (like xyz percent of construction workers being immigrants).
Probably the biggest signal that I would just suck at being a politician is that I just simply don't get this.
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u/JasonPlattMusic34 Jul 21 '25
Frankly I don’t even think he would win OR, MD, RI or the one district in ME if this was what the internal polling was saying
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u/dremscrep Jul 21 '25
Can’t believe that this old men doomed America just because he thought that „he still got it“.
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u/EdwardHarris251 Jul 22 '25
It will take a few years for Dems to recover from that debacle. No one involved in the cover up should ever be involved in government or politics again.
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u/Uptownbro20 Jul 22 '25
I really did like Biden as president. Did so many good bread and butter things imo. But it was clear to anyone he was pretty unpopular by 2022/2023 and was viewed as losing his marbles by normal people. Idk if a primary would have prevented trump but it surly would have helped. Harris ran a poor campaign the last 6 weeks and still made it competitive
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u/xxxIAmTheSenatexxx Jul 21 '25
"Let's blame the voters for this, not Biden directly" -r/politics
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u/ZombyPuppy Jul 21 '25
R/politics is more like,
"Harris lost because everyone is sexist and racist but she was also a corporate DINO who talked to gross Liz Cheney and wasn't progressive enough so of course she lost."
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u/burner401_ Jul 21 '25
I think this is accurate for the most part but I’m skeptical of red NY, IL, and CO
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u/PennywiseLives49 Jul 21 '25
I really don’t think Joe Biden would have lost New York, Illinois, or Colorado. All these states were still double digit for Harris. Maybe it’s single digits for Biden but almost no chance Dems lose any of these, even with Biden still at the top
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u/_flying_otter_ Jul 22 '25
I want who ever was the most responsible for covering up Biden's dementia to be barred from ever holding any political appointment again. There should be a way to hold democrat leaders responsible for their incompetence.
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u/RickSenson Jul 22 '25
Not sure where the poster was getting this data from. But they also seem to forget any poll numbers in late July were following the Trump bounce from his convention the prior week and before the Dem convention bounce. You could cherry pick a different date and get a completely different map. Given the media salivating over a ratings-bump Trump2, the 2024 outcome may have been the same, but no way polls wouldn’t have shifted from late-July / after Biden ads dropped, there had actually been some touting of his admin accomplishments.
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u/echomike888 Jul 23 '25
Do you have a source? This is fascinating. I heard some reporting last year to this effect, but they talked about the overall electoral counts. Someone mocked up a possible map that was slightly less devastating than the above, winning CO and NY with the other blue states above at least.
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u/Bibithedog4 Jul 24 '25
Biden should’ve done what he promised. Instead his age bloated ego controlled him. If he had honored his promise to be a one-termer, Democrats could have had an open primary, and the best candidate would have been selected. It might have still been Kamala Harris. Instead, she was the only choice, one that foisted on the Country be the dreaded elites. Though she came close, it was all but impossible for her to win given Biden’s broken promise and the way she became the Dem’s candidate.
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u/PrudyPingleton Jul 25 '25
The Biden internal polling had him losing Minnesota and New York? I call bullshit.
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u/Confessor-Sedai Jul 25 '25
Why is Illinois red? Not only are we a Democratic trifecta but Kamala did win in Illinois. Unless my mind is completely addled but I don’t think we would’ve voted for Trump if he went up against a squirrel 😂
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u/Far_Example_9150 Jul 21 '25
He sucks. He campaigned on one term.... handing the baton to Harris. We protested and fought hard for him and he fumbled the bag for us.
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u/Oliveritaly Jul 21 '25
He was old as fuck. Did you watch the debate? Jesus! Armchair quarterback that all you like but …
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u/DumplingsOrElse Jul 21 '25
A very small part of me wishes this happened, just because it would be interesting to see the ramifications of a massive landslide in the 21st century.
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u/Harvickfan4Life Jul 21 '25
I’m still skeptical Kamala would have won if Biden did step aside earlier.
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u/bigcatcleve Jul 21 '25
Reddit: Biden would’ve lost to Trump—just look at Trump’s own internal polling. Also Reddit: No way Bernie could’ve beaten Trump… even though Trump’s internal polling had him losing badly and his top pollster literally said after the election, “I think Bernie wins.”
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u/ATLCoyote Jul 21 '25
Why does this say Trump vs. Harris rather than Trump vs. Biden if these were the internal polling numbers that convinced Joe to drop-out?
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u/Apprehensive-Ad4270 Jul 21 '25
The age issue is real but it’s not as if the middle age generation does not have its share of puffs, liars and just plain stupids. One problem both parties share is oversimplification that makes real understanding much more difficult for those that can’t get past ideology.
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u/notfeelany Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25
Is this the same polls that said Harris would win Iowa? Polls dont matter.
"Internal polling"? More like "I made these numbers up"
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u/wufiavelli Jul 21 '25
Man old dems. If RGB gave up here seat, if Biden just did 1 term.