As President Biden tries to stem a growing rebellion in his own party, both his supporters and detractors are closely watching the polls. Biden was already narrowly losing to Donald Trump in most surveys before his catastrophic debate two weeks ago, and polls since then largely shown further erosion — though milder than some expected. But is Biden now in too deep a hole to realistically stage a comeback? I spoke with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, about whether the president can turn things around, why Democratic senators are consistently outperforming him, and whether Kamala Harris is a better matchup against Trump.

On Wednesday, Cook Political Report moved six states, including Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, toward Trump in your Electoral College ratings. Polling has been bad for Biden since the debate, but there still haven’t been a ton of high-quality ones, and few surveys of key swing states that will decide this election. Were your ratings changes based mostly on numbers alone? Or is it more your evaluation of Biden’s overall weakness and the trajectory of this race?
I think the latter is the correct way to think about it. What I wrote in my piece is if you look at where the race was in those Electoral College battleground states before the debate, it was pretty clear that Biden was struggling in the Sun Belt, and there was a lot of talk that Biden’s only path was through the Midwest. But we kept the Sun Belt states as tossups because we hadn’t seen a real engagement of the campaign yet. And that was clearly what the Biden campaign’s message has been all along: “Well, just wait until we engage. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll see.”

“Watch me,” as Biden would say.
What we watched was obviously a disastrous debate. So if the best-case scenario is he stays where he is, that means he’s still down, and outside the margin of error in all those states that we moved from tossup to lean Republican. And if we look at the national polling that has been out since the election, you don’t see that much movement, but it’s movement away from Biden and a little bit toward Trump. It’s basically a two point shift in Trump’s favor. The way I continue to think about it is — tell me how you doing worse is going to help things get better in places where you were already losing.

But what is the path for improving these numbers in the coming weeks, especially if the campaign is never quite going to get into full gear? I assume that question influences your thinking here.
The path forward, if Biden is the nominee, is that he continues to try to find ways to shift the campaign focus away from his age and his performance and onto Donald Trump. I do think that part of the reason Biden’s approval ratings are as low as they are, even before the debate, is that some of the issues about his age are baked in. In other words, I do think that it’s not just about inflation........

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