The Biden Campaign Says He's Doing Fine. The Post-Debate Polls Say Otherwise.

President Joe Biden in recent days has maintained that he has a strong chance of winning reelection, but surveys in key states show the presidential race tilting toward former President Donald Trump.

The shift is especially stark in Pennsylvania, where he has trailed Trump in every poll conducted since Biden’s poor showing in the June 27 debate.

He has insisted things are fine.

“If you look at all the polling data, the polling data shows a lot of different things, but there’s no wide gap between us,” Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt on Monday . “It’s essentially a toss-up race.”

But Biden’s more optimistic assertion in a Saturday meeting with a group of moderate House Democrats — that he led the last three national polls by four points — is simply incorrect. In national polls, Biden went from a tie with Trump to trailing him by 2 percentage points.

“He is in a significantly worse position today than he was the day before the debate,” said Lakshya Jain, a co-founder of the democratic polling and analysis firm Split Ticket, which does not have any political clients. “The debate was supposed to be the inflection point — and it was, but in the wrong way for Biden.”

At the same time, while Biden’s Democratic detractors had been counting on a dramatic shift in public opinion to help convince him to step aside, they have not received it. Biden’s slide in the polls has been very incremental, leaving him within the margin of error in the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the three states most essential for victory in November. There has even been at least one set of battleground state polling — conducted by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult in early July — that showed Biden gaining ground on