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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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Joe Biden's campaign sent out a memo to staffers showing the president trailing behind former President Donald Trump.
The Wednesday memo included internal polling that showed Biden had dropped half a percentage point in battleground states before and after last week's presidential debate, according to Politico. Ahead of the debate, Biden was tied with Trump at 43 percent, but the memo said Biden had fallen to 42 percent by Tuesday, while Trump improved his vote share by 0.2 percentage points.
The memo is part of a larger effort to calm fears within the Biden campaign. It comes amid the president's post-debate crisis, which has led to calls from within the Democratic Party for his withdrawal from the race. Some of the president's closest allies have also questioned his ability to serve another term in the wake of the debate. Politico reported that an all-staff call was also scheduled for midday Wednesday.
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Biden's top campaign officials appeared to be preparing staffers for an expected new poll "likely to show a slightly larger swing in the race," Biden's campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in the memo. The poll hasn't yet been publicly released.
"We are going to see a few polls come out today and we want you all to hear from us on what we know internally and what we expect to come externally," the memo told campaign staff. "Polls are a snapshot in time and we should all expect them to continue to fluctuate — it will take a few weeks, not a few days, to get a full picture of the race."
The memo reminded staffers to "keep in mind" that "the NYT themselves acknowledged that they are often a polling outlier."
The Times' chief political analyst Nate Cohn wrote last week that while the newspaper's most recent poll "doesn't look much like other polls," outlier polls shouldn't be "tossed out altogether."
"That's the hardest thing about outliers: Sometimes they're right," Cohn said. "Yes, outliers are less likely to be accurate. Yes, they might simply be off by chance. But they might also reflect a new shift in the race that other pollsters haven't yet reported. They might reflect something novel — and correct — about a survey's methodology."
The poll released last week showed Trump ahead by 6 percentage points among registered voters and 3 points among likely voters nationally—the former president's best result in months.
Polls are already beginning to show how Biden's debate performance has caused a dip in support for his re-election campaign. A CBS poll released Wednesday showed Trump up 3 points across battleground states and up 2 points nationally.
A leaked internal poll, conducted 72 hours after the debate and released by Puck News Tuesday, found that Biden suffered "the largest single-week drop" in nearly three years. The catastrophic decline showed that previously noncompetitive states Virginia, New Hampshire and New Mexico were now in play for Trump.
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