A pro-Biden strategist threatened to cut an interview short after a reporter questioned his characterization of polls showing Republicans leading key races as being “just wrong.”
Simon Rosenberg, a founder of the New Democrat Network, said during an interview with the New Yorker published Thursday that the “fundamental dynamic” of American elections since the Dobbs decision is one of “consistent Democratic over-performance.” When New Yorker reporter Isaac Chotiner pressed Rosenberg on his claims, citing FiveThirtyEight.com’s review of polling accuracy from the 2022 midterms, Rosenberg threatened to stop the interview.
“I’m ending the interview,” Rosenberg told Chotiner. “I’m ending the interview because what you’re doing is ridiculous.”
“Because I have definitive proof that what you’re saying is not true. And I don’t care,” Rosenberg added when Chotiner asked why. “I know what FiveThirtyEight wrote. I live this every day. And so, the point is what you’re saying is wrong. I am on record saying that what FiveThirtyEight has written is incorrect, and I’ve given you definitive proof otherwise. So if you want to keep coming back at this, do it. But this has become one of the most ridiculous interviews that I’ve ever done my entire professional career.”
Prior to the threat, Rosenberg dismissed FiveThirtyEight.com’s assessment of poll accuracy.
“They’re wrong about that,” Rosenberg claimed. “I mean, they’re just wrong. They’re wrong. I mean, I’m presenting you with facts.”
Rosenberg asserted that the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, realigned “the whole political landscape” in favor of the Democrats.
“I think there has been a tendency in recent years among commentators to overestimate the strength of Republicans and to underestimate our strength. And we saw that play out in 2022,” Rosenberg told Chotiner. “The fundamental dynamic of our politics, since the spring of 2022, has been consistent Democratic over-performance and consistent Republican underperformance. We saw it across the country in 2023. We’ve seen the same manifestation in 2024, with Trump struggling, and bleeding some of his votes, and underperforming polls in the primaries.”
Republicans underperformed expectations of a “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections and had a disappointing 2023 election night, losing control of the Virginia General Assembly and failing to unseat Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Biden received support from 87% of black voters in 2020, according to a CNN exit poll.
New Interview: I talked to the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg about why he thinks Biden isn’t currently losing to Trump, whether he and the White House are too optimistic about the state of the campaign, and why he doesn’t like poll averages. https://t.co/kO8y567FgT pic.twitter.com/6RF8km3Rry
— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) May 23, 2024
Trump currently leads Biden by 1.0% in the RealClearPolitics average of general election polls for a head-to-head matchup, with the lead growing to 2.4% when Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent candidates Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are included.
A New York Times poll released May 13 showed Biden trailing Trump in five out of six swing states polled, with Trump receiving 23% support from black registered voters in swing states in a head-to-head matchup, compared to 63% for Biden.
Rosenberg said that Trump’s lead over Biden in the 2024 election will slowly crumble as the campaigns get closer to election day.
“There are six things now that are true about him that were not true in 2020, that all voters are going to come to know in the following months,” Rosenberg claimed, citing the E. Jean Carroll case, the civil fraud trial, the classified documents case and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, while also pointing to Democratic claims that Trump said he would end democracy and the Dobbs decision.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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