If you don’t like the answers, change who asks the questions.
President Biden’s campaign has brought in a bevy of pollsters to assist his re-election effort, according to a report published one day after a Wall Street Journal survey revealed the Democratic incumbent was trailing former President Donald Trump in six competitive swing states.
The Biden campaign’s eight new hires included a mix of pollsters who previously worked for the president’s 2020 campaign and others who helped Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm vote, Politico reported.
The Journal poll, published Tuesday evening, found Trump, 77, between one and six percentage points ahead of Biden, 81, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.
The president won every one of those states except North Carolina in 2020, boosted by black, Hispanic and young voters who have recently shown diminished enthusiasm for Biden.
First lady Jill Biden dismissed the results in a Wednesday interview on “CBS Mornings,” saying her husband was “not losing in all the battleground states” and was “even or doing better.”
A rep for the Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear whether the pollsters are specifically tasked with reinvigorating Biden’s 2024 campaign in response to the disappointing Journal poll numbers.
But Celinda Lake, Matt Barreto and Silas Lee — all of whom were employed four years ago as part of Biden’s successful run for the White House — will return to his campaign, with Barreto and Lee expected to ramp up operations to turn out black and Hispanic voters.
Other 2020 re-hires include focus group and qualitative research expert David Binder and John Anzalone, who was the Biden 2020 campaign’s lead pollster but told Politico he would only be an adviser this time around.
Anzalone, who serves as president of the public opinion research and consulting firm Impact Research, will be joined by his colleague Molly Murphy, who was lead pollster for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2022.
The new hires also include Geoff Garin, the president of Hart Research and a 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign alum; Jefrey Pollock, a former polling adviser to Illinois Gov. J.B. Prtizker and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.); and Brenda Lee, another DCCC veteran.
Biden’s stump speeches that have tarnished GOPers as “MAGA Republicans” up and down the ballot since 2022 were the brainchild of Garin and Pollock, according to Politico.
“Team Biden-Harris is building infrastructure to put us on a path to victory this fall, and bringing together a battle-tested, world-class data and polling operation is an essential step,” senior campaign adviser of opinion research Mindy Myers told the outlet in a statement.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new hires after recently announcing their new pick for top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, who helped conduct the Journal poll and previously worked for the MAGA Inc. super PAC.
