CNN’s data guru slammed President Biden on Wednesday for either knowingly or unknowingly making inaccurate statements about the election polls.
CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten criticized Biden in an articled headlined, “Joe Biden made a false statement about his current polling.” He specifically called out the president for stating in an BET interview that “presidents who have won at this stage of the game, the last 7 or 8 presidents, five of them were losing at this time by significant margins.”
“Either way, his statement doesn’t hold water,” Enten wrote.
Enten went on CNN to express similar sentiments on how Biden doesn’t have his facts straight.
Harry Enten called out President Biden for inaccurate statements about presidential polls over the years.
“I decided to go back and look, because Joe Biden‘s making a number of comments about the polls and that‘s my wheelhouse. That‘s my wheelhouse. And if you‘re going to come into my wheelhouse, you better have your facts straight,” he said.
“So, I looked at the last 8 elections and said, ‘Okay, did the polling leader at this particular point go on to win the election, or, in the case of Joe Biden, which is what Joe Biden is hoping for, was, in fact, the person who was trailing go on to win the election?'” Enten added. “And what we found is, in fact, the poll leader at this point, 6-out-of-8 times, 6-out-of-8 times, that’s 75% of the time, has gone on to win the election.”
Enten went on to clarify that he is not outright accusing Biden of lying, but is open to the possibility he simply doesn’t understand the polling data.
“So it turns out that Joe Biden’s statement that he made in that interview with BET simply put, does not hold water,” he said. “He is not — I don‘t want to say he‘s not being honest because he just may, in fact, not understand what the polling data shows, but the fact is Joe Biden‘s been making a number of statements.”
President Joe Biden speaks at the 115th NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, Tuesday, July 16, 2024. (AP Photo/David Becker)
“What he didn’t tell you was presidents who have poll numbers like he does, they go on to lose,” Enten said.
Enten argued that recent history does not bode well for Biden’s electoral chances.
“There is no president in modern American politics polling in which you had an approval rating south of 40%, like Joe Biden, and a disapproval rating north of 50%, like Joe Biden, who‘s gone on to win,” he said. “You have to go all the way back, all the way back since 1948 to find an incumbent who was as down as much as Joe Biden is right now and actually went on to win the election in November.”