Joe Biden made a false statement about his current polling

CNN —

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.

Rep. Adam Schiff departs a House Democratic Caucus meeting in this file photo.

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Incumbents such as Barack Obama in 2012, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 were all ahead by now. All