President Joe Biden tends to brush off bad polls and insist that there are eight that show him beating Donald Trump for every two that show him losing.
Vice President Kamala Harris, confronted with those same polls, is much less dismissive.
“We’re going to have to earn our reelect, there’s no doubt about it,” the vice president told CNN in an exclusive phone interview from Air Force Two after spending just over an hour in South Carolina on a trip to officially file Biden for the Democratic primary there.
Polling nationally and in battleground states alike suggests the president, who turns 81 on Monday, is weak with young voters, as well as with Black and other voters of color. Overall, Biden and Harris hold similar approval ratings, but Harris’ ratings among these key subgroups have varied, suggesting views of the vice president are not as deeply entrenched. Several Harris insiders have optimistically pointed to the New York Times/Siena College polls of battleground states released this month, which showed “11 percent of Ms. Harris’s would-be supporters do not back Mr. Biden, and two-thirds of them are either nonwhite or younger than 30,” according to The Times.
That has created an uncomfortable dynamic for the Biden team in Wilmington, Delaware, and the West Wing that has mythologized his connection with voters as being stronger than polls can measure and where some are still carrying grudges from the Democratic primary race. Harris is consistently rating better – which, to a growing number of Democrats, means that if Biden wants a second term in an election that Biden aides are forecasting will be won by slivers of votes, he will need to rely on her help to get there.
But they need to lean into that marginal advantage without exposing her so much that she proves a liability with voters who don’t like her – including those…
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