Market Data 
Joe Biden just made a false statement about his current polling position. He told BET that “presidents who have won at this stage of the game, the last seven or eight presidents, five of them were losing at this time by significant margins.”
A look at history, however, shows no such thing. Instead, it reveals that Biden is in a weak position for an incumbent president, and incumbents who are trailing at this point in the campaign rarely come back to win.
It’s not entirely clear whether Biden was referring to sitting presidents (i.e., counting only races with incumbents) or future presidents (i.e., counting all presidential races). Either way, his statement doesn’t hold water.
Let’s talk about incumbents first. I went back and looked at all available polling data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (from 1940 to 2020) and Gallup (for 1936). This includes 15 presidential races that featured incumbents.
Just two incumbents (George W. Bush in 2004 and Harry Truman in 1948) were trailing by any margin at this point in the campaign and came back to win. That’s a far cry from five of the last seven or eight presidents, as Biden put it to BET.
Of the past eight incumbents who ran for reelection, five faced a deficit in the average of polls at this point. Four of them lost — Trump in 2020, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Gerald Ford in 1976. Only George W. Bush was down at this stage in 2004 and went on to win.
Incumbents such as Barack Obama in 2012, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 were all ahead by now. All would be reelected.
Indeed, the track record for incumbents who were leading at this point in their campaigns is strong — and since 1936, all of them emerged victorious.
Biden, though, may not just have been referring to incumbents. He may have been including future presidents too. Open races, in which the candidates are often less well known, tend to be more unpredictable.
In this case, though, Biden’s statement is still wrong. The candidate leading at this point in the campaign has won six of the past eight presidential elections. Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2004 were the exceptions.
(Note: I’m talking about winning the election, not the popular vote. Though if we’re examining the popular vote, it would still remain six out of eight because while the 2016 polls at this point would have predicted the correct popular vote winner, the 2000 polls would not.)
For the purposes of understanding the depth of Biden’s problem, we can go back even further. Although Biden didn’t say this himself, I was interested to see, going back to 1936, how often a candidate trailed by a significant margin just before the party conventions but went on to win.
You can find others who were doing worse than Biden is right now and won. George H.W. Bush was losing in 1988 to Michael Dukakis. Richard Nixon was down to Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Add those to Trump in 2016 and Truman in 1948, and you get four examples of candidates who were trailing at this point by at least as much as Biden is currently and went on to win. Still, that’s not the five Biden said, and we’ve widened the sample size to more than double what he mentioned in his BET interview.
You can get to five if you include George W. Bush, whose deficit in 2004 was not as bad as Biden’s. Biden is behind by about 3 points or worse in the swing states, while Bush was down by 1 to 2 points nationally. A 5 out of 21 (23%) chance of victory isn’t where an incumbent president wants to be right now.
Lastly, I’ll note that if we focus solely on races in which presidents were seeking reelection, we can see what Biden’s real problem is. He’s an incumbent with an approval rating south of 40% and a disapproval rating north of 50%.
There have been other incumbents running for reelection with similarly bad numbers — Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both lost, and not by small margins.
Ironically, the best hope for Biden is the example of Trump, who was down at this point in 2020 by far more than Biden is now. Trump had an approval rating right at 40% (so not significantly better than Biden’s current numbers) and a disapproval rating well above 50%.
Trump ended up barely losing in the pivotal battleground states.
Now this Trump example doesn’t make Biden’s remark about the polls to BET somehow true. No matter how you look at it, his statement is incorrect.
Perhaps more worrisome is it’s not the first time Biden has tried to diagnose his polling in public in a way that is at best misleading. He did so during his news conference last week, when he said, “There are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now.”
While he seemed to give himself a little more wiggle room than he did in his BET interview, the idea he is trying to push — that plenty of people in his position have come back to win — is a constant theme.
But it gives his supporters false hope. While I wouldn’t consider his prospects dire — a Biden victory is possible — the president is in quite a bad place polling-wise.
