Former President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod said it is unhelpful to dismiss concerns about President Biden’s poor marks in major polls, defending his recent criticism of the president’s reelection campaign.
Axelrod said in an interview with Politico that he finds it “aggravating” that people who air their concerns about the Biden campaign’s strategy are called “bed-wetters.”
Politico asked him if he’s referring to Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, who often shares his support for Biden through social media and punditry and has dismissed polls as this far out from the election as “silly.”
“I think that’s deeply, deeply unhelpful, because sometimes there’s reason to be concerned. And there are a lot of really smart and committed supporters of Biden who have concerns,” Axelrod said in the interview, which published Friday.
“What you need to do is contemplate what it is that is concerning people, and decide what is legitimate and what needs to be done. There are people who are really, really committed to Joe Biden who felt a sense of concern and urgency — particularly because Donald Trump is on the other side of this race. So I thought it was extraordinarily tone-deaf and unhelpful,” he said.
Axelrod, who is a political commentator on CNN and hosts podcasts, recently received a political pin in the mail with the message “Pricks for Biden,” Politico reported.
He defended his decision to point out challenges for Biden, especially when his suggestion in November that it was the “last moment” for Biden to check if he should drop out.
“I know that people expect 100 percent loyalty, but that’s not my job,” Axelrod said. “It’s pretty obvious that there are challenges here, and it seemed pretty obvious to me when I suggested in early November that he think hard about what he’s doing. I was 99 percent sure that that would not mean anything, but I thought there was a 1 percent chance that he would actually rethink the thing.”
He prefaced his comments, like he has other criticism, by saying he thinks Biden has done great things with his first three years in office, pointing especially to the infrastructure law and leading the U.S. out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden campaign has largely responded to negative polling by saying that, this far out, polls typically aren’t predictive of voters in November. The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment on Axelrod’s comments Friday.
A source close to the Biden campaign told The Hill that “unlike the 2012 campaign, we’re coming off of the strongest midterm performance of a president since FDR.”
White House aides often point out that Obama was in a difficult polling situation a year ahead of his reelection race and still won. Democrats, meanwhile, had stronger-than-expected midterm results in 2022, similar to when President Franklin D. Roosevelt picked up seats for the party in the 1934 midterm elections after guiding the U.S. through the Great Depression.
The aggregation of polls kept by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ shows former President Trump, the GOP front-runner, with a lead of 1.2 percentage points over Biden.