Pollercoaster with Dan Pfeiffer - Preview | Trump leading Biden?

The Crooked 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.

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 08

and White House senior advisor in 2011, 2012,

would tell him to stop,

he would say, 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 Crooked Media.

I remember Plouffe used to say,

we're not gonna play the polling game.

about every single poll,

which is exactly what they continue to do now.

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%, the president now has

his lowest approval rating to date.

All really fun stuff.

In this first ever episode of Polar Coaster,

I just wanna 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.

Cornell, 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 of different ways, right?

Polling is a really insider thing.

My big is a 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 differences is

between the candidates on issues that matter.

As opposed to saying, you know,

Donald heads 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 too 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 was 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.

And this is sort of the,

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 gonna happen, right?

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, you know, 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 wanna be like perfectly frank with people,

there are some flaws in the Biden-Obama comparisons

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 trolly 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 get bounced back to a decent place,

like not all the way there,

but whether so Biden is behind where Obama was,

it doesn't mean he won't be in a better place,

he's a very different race,

it's a different democratic coalition.

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

he's not, 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 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.

of what they think the electorate's gonna look like.

How many Republicans, how many Democrats,

how many young people, how many black voters,

Latino voters are gonna turn out.

And if you guess wrong,

then you're gonna 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, the polls, in 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.

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, in our data,

Obama still has a thermometer among them in the 70s,

but Democrats have a thermometer in the 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 gonna build a campaign and strategy

to solve for that problem.

And I think what you're gonna see over the next

couple of weeks, couple of months,

and they've actually began to do it already,

is building a strategy to solve for that problem.

and this is consistent with the sort of infamous

Time's 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 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?

because it's about how you define the economy.

You, again, we'll go back to grounds

that we're most comfortable with, right?

There is an early polling on the question

of 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 who would do better on the economy,

who would do better at creating jobs.

But where there was an opportunity for Obama

and then we pressed it was,

well, who's gonna fight for you, right?

Who's gonna fight for the middle class?

Who's gonna fight for people like you, right?

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 gonna use his business acumen,

his knowledge to fight for people like you,

he's gonna 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,

fighting for the middle class,

fighting for working class people.

And I think that's where the opportunity for Biden is,

because look, he is Joe 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 advantages

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 gonna have to be who's fighting for people like you,

who's gonna 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 can't have, we don't want that debate.

We want the debate to be about,

in the end, middle America,

who's gonna be on your side?

Is it gonna be Donald Trump?

Is he gonna be on the side of wealthy people like himself?

Are they gonna 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 gonna be on your side?

And I think that is the economic terms of the debate

that from the Democratic standpoint,

you wanna 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 gonna be

what we determine the top issue gonna be.

a lot of Democrats freaked out.

So 538 does, has average rule 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 at all that Biden's below

where Trump was at this point?

I'm not, these millennial voters where,

where he's gotta 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.

We do, because we are going to drive

this rollercoaster 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 nauseous 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?

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