“What this is among other things is a failure to really hammer home basic messages to the base and to swing voters as well.”
A CNN panel sounded the alarm over a recent poll showing Joe Biden losing to former President Donald Trump in major swing states in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, calling it a “major wake-up call to all Democrats.”
A New York Times/Sienna College poll over the weekend found Trump trouncing Biden in 5 of the 6 major battleground states and defeating him with over 300 electoral college votes.
CNN analyst Errol Louis downplayed the poll’s findings, claiming Democrats will “come home” when the 2024 election draws closer and that the idea black voters will abandon Biden was “not something that you can take all that seriously.”
“Likewise with the Latino vote. You know, the notion that Trump could almost catch [Biden among] women voters…I just don’t buy that,” he added.
But Louis warned that Democrats need to “activate” their base to shore up Biden’s hemorrhaging support.
“But now, what this does do is it suggests that Democrats have to get out there, they’ve got to talk to their younger voters. The 18-to-29s are the ones I think they should be worried about because they get their information from different places. They’re getting it from TikTok or wherever,” Louis claimed.
“You’ve got to also talk to women and sort of get into the coalitions, the activist coalitions that form the base of the Democratic Party. The labor coalitions, the environmentalists, the women’s groups. You’ve got to do it, you’ve got to work them.”
“You’ve got to make it so that everybody’s on message,” he said, adding, “So we should have this conversation in six months and see where they are.”
CNN’s John Avlon pushed back against Louis’ analysis, claiming the poll is indicative of the Biden campaign’s failure to outline a “basic message.”
“With all due respect to my dear friend Errol, I disagree with him about the posture that, ‘Yeah, everyone’s gonna come home especially if you call them,’” Avlon responded. “I think it’s too late to wait for next year. What this is among other things is a failure to really hammer home basic messages to the base and to swing voters as well. This poll should be a major wake-up call to all Democrats, as well as the White House.”
“Yes, it’s a snapshot in time. Yes, Democrats have been out outperforming in special elections this year dramatically. There are countervailing things,” he went on.
“But if Democrats are starting to slide among young people, among Hispanics and African Americans, when a lot of the fact patterns are pretty good, it’s in part because Biden’s team has not been selling the accomplishments of this administration, and they have not been responding clearly enough to these kinds of trends that are not their friend.”
Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz dismissed the poll’s findings over the weekend, saying that “predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later.”
“[W]e’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll,” he told the New York Times.
