‘Insanity’: Leaked polling predicts Biden bloodbath

Democrats are on track for an election bloodbath following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, according to leaked polling.

Democrats are on track for an election bloodbath following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, according to leaked polling.

A confidential memo circulating among Democrats, obtained by Puck News on Tuesday, has revealed the 81-year-old President’s support is tumbling in key battleground states needed to win back the White House in November.

The poll, conducted by Democratic data firm OpenLabs in the 72 hours after Thursday’s debate in Atlanta, suggest Mr Biden’s “diminished standing is now putting previously non-competitive states like New Hampshire, Virginia and New Mexico in play for Donald Trump”, wrote Puck News’ Peter Hamby.

If the election were held today, the numbers suggest Mr Biden would not only lose all seven of the swing states thought to hold the key to the White House in 2024 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but also states he won convincingly four years ago.

Joe Biden’s support has plummeted following the debate. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP

Those include New Hampshire, which last voted Republican in 2000, Virginia, which Mr Biden won by 10 points in 2020, and New Mexico, which has gone Democrat in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

Hamby said the memo “circulating among anxious Democrats is confirming some of their worst fears”.

In Pennsylvania, the state that “now represents the tipping point” for the Republican to reach the required 270 electoral votes needed for the presidency, Mr Biden now trails Mr Trump by 7.3 per cent, according to the memo.

An electoral map based on the polling data shows the US painted a sea of red, suggesting Republicans could win as many as 333 electoral votes to Democrats’ 205.

The latest polling shows Joe Biden is facing an uphill battle.

In the 14 battlegrounds spotlighted by OpenLabs, which also included Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, Mr Biden lost between 1.7 per cent and 2.4 per cent to Mr Trump compared to the Democrat’s pre-debate numbers.

“Underpinning the decline is an increase in already-high concerns about the President’s age, and a growing split among Democrats about what should happen with his candidacy,” it states.

The OpenLabs poll also found 40 per cent of those who voted for Mr Biden in 2020 now believe he should end his campaign, representing a “significant shift” since May when only one quarter believed he should drop out.

Donald Trump has pulled ahead in key swing states. Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

“Biden is also taking a major hit among swing voters — by a two-to-one margin, they believe Biden should exit the race,” Hamby wrote.

While the OpenLabs memo did not contain any information about the methodology such as sample sizes or margins of error, the firm is widely trusted in Democratic circles and is the research arm of Future Forward, the preferred super political action committee (PAC) used by the Biden campaign to accept unlimited donations.

The group raised $US101 million ($151 million) to support Mr Biden’s re-election, Bloomberg reports. Its top donor is Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of the financial news network.

OpenLabs also tested a number of possible Democratic replacements in a hypothetical match-up against Mr Trump.

“The results were sobering,” Hamby wrote.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg all polled ahead of Mr Biden in every battleground state.

The former President is now leading in key swing states. Picture: X

The polling showed Ms Harris with a slightly higher favourability rating than Mr Biden at 41 per cent to 38 per cent, and a lower unfavorability rating at 52 per cent to 60 per cent.

A CBS News poll released on Monday found that 45 per cent of Democrats want Mr Biden to step aside — a position also advocated on Friday by The New York Times editorial board.

On Tuesday, Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett became the first House Democrat to publicly call for Mr Biden to step aside.

The Biden campaign has insisted that the President is not dropping out of the race, and has vowed to show up for a second debate against Mr Trump, set for September 10.

The White House has acknowledged it was a “bad debate” but has insisted he shouldn’t be judged on one performance.

It comes after Mr Biden on Tuesday offered a new excuse for his debate performance last week, claiming foreign travel left him so tuckered out that he nearly “fell asleep”.

“I decided to travel around the world a couple of times … shortly before the debate,” Mr Biden told Democratic donors in McLean, Virginia.

“It wasn’t very smart [to be] travelling around the world a couple times. I didn’t listen to my staff … and then I almost fell asleep on stage.”

Questions have swirled about Mr Biden’s mental acuity for months but have been dismissed by the White House.

Mr Biden has rejected calls to drop out. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Mr Biden blamed foreign travel for the debate performance despite making just two brief recent foreign trips — travelling on June 5-9 to France to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day and on June 12-14 to the annual G7 summit in Italy — ahead of the June 27 CNN debate against Mr Trump.

Mr Biden was at his Rehoboth Beach getaway June 18-20 before travelling to Camp David in western Maryland, where he remained out of public view for the week before the debate.

Debate prep sessions “never started before 11am and Mr Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day”, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Speaking to CNN on Monday, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein said he had been told of multiple occasions that left those around Mr Biden concerned.

“These are people, several of them who are very close to President Biden, who loved him, have supported him, and among them are some people who would raise a lot of money for him,” Bernstein said.

“They are adamant that what we saw the other night is not a one-off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year-and-a-half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed.”

He added, “I’ve talked to people in the last year [who have said] we have a problem. There have been numerous instances where the President has lost his train of thought [and] can’t pick it up again.”

— with NY Post

Originally published as ‘Insanity’: Leaked polling predicts Biden bloodbath