Too Fun to Check: Biden Internal Polling Had Trump Winning 400 Electoral College Votes?

Color me very skeptical about this claim, even though it comes from people with obviously good connections. Former Obama adviser Jon Favreau co-hosts Pod Save America with fellow Obamaites Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer, and on Friday, they conducted their own post-mortem of Kamala Harris’s stunning loss to Donald Trump. 

The trio targeted Joe Biden as the author of this electoral catastrophe, blaming the outgoing quasi-president for refusing to accept that he had become deeply unpopular and that inflation had ruined his chances for re-election. Right up until the disastrous debate, Favreau claims, Biden and his team told reporters that their polling showed he had the best chance to win the election and that Kamala Harris had no shot at all. (Events would prove them correct, which Favreau fails to mention.)

However, Favreau accuses Biden of lying about their internal polling. He claims that the polling showed Biden losing 400 or more Electoral College votes … at least according to Team Kamala, which inherited the data (via Townhall):

“Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake.” – @JonFavs
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— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) November 8, 2024

FAVREAU: They were privately telling reporters at the time that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. So they were shivving Kamala Harris to reporters while they told everyone else, “Not a time for an open process, and his vice president can’t win, so he’s the strongest candidate.” Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes. That’s what their own internal polling said.  

Did Favreau actually see this polling data? Or did he get that information from Team Kamala? Because this sounds either like ex post facto excuse-making or a way to lower expectations at the beginning of an incompetent’s campaign. 

There are good reasons for skepticism on this claim. First off, while the public polls clearly underestimated Trump’s strength for the third cycle in a row, were they so far off as to miss that scale of a landslide? The last time we had a 400-elector landslide in a two-person presidential race was 1984, when Ronald Reagan won 49 states over Walter Mondale. His first election against Jimmy Carter might be more directly analogous, however. Reagan beat Carter in the popular vote by almost ten percentage points on his way to 489-elector win. Carter only won six states and DC while getting just 41% of the popular vote. (Independent candidate John Anderson got 6.6% of the vote but no electors.) Bill Clinton never got to 400; neither did Barack Obama, a point that Favreau et al should know well.

Polling may not be great this cycle, but it never showed a split of that magnitude before Biden quit — not even after the debate, when Biden’s numbers actually rebounded a bit before his withdrawal:

The RCP aggregate gap in national polling was only 3.1 points in Trump’s favor at that point. Even if one assumes that the polls were off so much that the gap was double — and it might have been — that would have Biden around 43-44%.

Is that enough for a 400-elector landslide? I suppose, but which states would flip to make up 88 electors? Here’s the final Electoral College map from Tuesday’s election, which has Trump at 312 electors, from 270toWin:

So which states would have flipped in the Biden polling data to get to 400? Trump got within five points in Virginia, so let’s give him those 13 electors. People love to talk about Minnesota, so add in 10 more. New Mexico seemed promising for a hot second; toss in five more. New Hampshire would have gone red before most of these, so add four to the kitty. Make Maine and Nebraska entirely red, too. That brings us to … 348:

Look how red the map becomes at just 348. Trump wins 36 states, and that’s still 52 electors short of 400. Even if one tosses in Colorado at this point, which is pretty reliably blue for both state and presidential elections now, you’d still need 42 more electors to claim 400 for Trump. Flipping New York and New Jersey would do it, but come on, man. Even the public pollsters would have noticed tight races in states like Colorado, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, etc etc etc. There were brief polling glimpses of Trump traction in VA, NM, and MN, but no sign of it elsewhere. Of course, pollsters did miss a massive shift in New Jersey, but Trump still came up five-plus points short there. 

In short, a 400-elector landslide would have required a shocking and massive realignment that even public pollsters couldn’t possibly have missed, not even in June. Obama’s first election was so obvious and overwhelming that it amounted to that kind of realignment (short-lived though it was), and Obama only won 365 electors, and only 28 states plus DC. 

Maybe Biden’s pollsters really did see a 400-elector landslide, although what followed next would make no sense. If Biden finally accepted that and stepped aside, why endorse Harris at all? The best option with that data would be to get an outsider to run in his place — one of the Democrat governors on the bench, like Gretchen Whitmer, pre-Dorito Eucharist. That way the ticket would be (mainly) “unburdened by what has been” and voter ire directed toward Biden rather than the ticket. The worst choice in that scenario would be to have Harris replace him, for lots of reasons.  

So color me very skeptical on this claim, at least until Favreau produces the data. Team Kamala has begun spinning like a top to blame Biden for the loss in order to preserve her potential as a candidate down the road, and this looks like a political myth in the making.