WASHINGTON — Erick Allen, chair of the Cobb County Democratic Committee, has been under no illusions that helping deliver his crucial state of Georgia in next year’s presidential election will be easy. After all, President Biden narrowly won the state in 2020, the exact margin burned into the national consciousness because of Donald Trump’s infamous recorded phone call seeking an additional 11,780 votes — one more than he needed for victory.
But Allen got a disconcerting reminder when he woke up last Sunday morning.
A new set of polls from The New York Times and Siena College showed Trump leading Biden in Georgia and four of the five other pivotal states that swung the last election — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — amid deep voter concerns about his job performance and age. Biden won all six states in 2020, including Wisconsin, where the poll showed he led Trump by just 2 percentage points.
“I think we should take the polling seriously, but I don’t think I’m ready to sound the alarms yet,” said Allen, 48, whose suburban Atlanta county is the state’s third largest and went for Biden by 14 percentage points in 2020. “I hope that where the alarms are being sounded is in the campaign office, and I’m confident they will have a strategy in place.”
Several local Democratic officials in the other battleground states had a similar reaction: concern but not panic with the presidential election still a year away. They said they remain solidly behind Biden as the Democratic nominee, although some noted there isn’t really another option at this point. But they acknowledged key findings of the poll that Biden doesn’t thrill many in their party and his age — at 80 he is the oldest sitting president — is a significant problem.
Still, Allen and other county Democratic chairs predicted that Biden’s poll numbers would improve as people focus more on the presidential election, particularly if the Republican nominee is Trump, 77, with all his baggage, his own advanced age, and pending court cases. Tuesday’s Democratic victories in elections nationwide, particularly the approval of an abortion rights constitutional amendment in Ohio, also boosted their confidence that the party’s agenda is popular even if their standard bearer is not.
“Democrats have to stop falling in love and they need to get in line,” said Lori McFarland, 65, the Democratic chair in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. “We have to vote the platform, not the person.”
White House and Biden campaign officials have downplayed the recent polls, saying that surveys this far out from the election have been off before, notably in 2011 when some showed Barack Obama trailing before he handily won a second term.
“We’ve heard the press and pundits count Joe Biden out time and time again. But we know that he always proves them wrong,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told reporters Thursday. “And if we want a real window into where voters actually are, we know the best way to measure that is to see how they’re actually voting.”
Democratic officials in the half-dozen battleground states know the fate of Biden’s reelection — and, in their view, American democracy itself — most likely rests on them next year, as it did in 2020. Alexia Sabor, 53, the party’s chair in Dane County, Wisconsin, a liberal bastion that includes the state capitol of Madison, said Tuesday’s results help “bolster your spirit” for the work ahead in a presidential election she is sure will again be extremely close.
But those victories, she warned, don’t matter when it comes to getting people to the polls next November.
“We have what I would consider a healthy level of concern,” she said of another Biden victory in the state. “We have a lot of evidence from the past few election cycles that there is a lot of support for Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden. In Wisconsin, we also know that we take for granted that a Democrat will win any of these races at our peril.”
Other recent polls have shown a tight race nationally between Biden and Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination. A CNN poll released Tuesday showed Trump leading Biden 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters. Only 25 percent of a broader group of all Americans said Biden has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president, compared to 53 percent for Trump.
The Times/Siena poll was particularly troubling to already nervous Democrats because it showed significant drops in support for Biden from young, Black and Latino voters. But some state Democratic officials noted that Biden’s numbers might be temporarily suppressed because of the poll’s timing. It was taken just as student loan repayments resumed on Oct. 1 for millions of young Americans after a pandemic pause that began in 2020, and amid growing concerns about the mounting death toll of Palestinian civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas that began after a vicious terrorist attack on Oct. 7 by the militant group.
“Because there isn’t always a gigantic humanitarian problem and war, it’s kind of a skewed point in time a little bit,” said Alysa Diebolt, 34, chair of the Democratic Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. “Obviously I’m worried. ... you’ve got to fight for every vote, for every election.”
Biden, administration officials, and his campaign have spent months touting his record, including record job growth and passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law that is funding more than 40,000 projects nationwide. But the effort has yet to improve Biden’s dismal approval ratings with many Americans still struggling with elevated prices for staples like gas and groceries, although inflation has moderated significantly since reaching a four-decade high last year.
“It’s our business as the Democratic Party and as a local party chair to give people the opportunity to hear the message of what the administration has done for them,” said Laura Carter, 64, the Democratic chair in Coconino County in northern Arizona. She’s not worried about the polling because she doesn’t believe Arizonans have focused yet on the presidential campaign.
And Carter said she hopes an abortion rights referendum will be on the state’s ballot next November, increasing turnout and votes for Biden.
“It’s a year out. There’s lots of polls,” she said. “There’s going to be more polls.”
But McFarland, of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, a traditionally Democratic area that includes Allentown, said the party needs to improve its efforts to sell Biden’s accomplishments to help offset concerns about his age that have been fueled by a consistent Republican drumbeat that he is too old for the job.
“They hear him speak and, as we all know, he has a stuttering impediment and that often doesn’t make him a very good orator. So people misunderstand that as slow to process, which isn’t true,” she said. “I can say I think he’s too old, but I still adore him and I still will vote for him.”
Kim Nagy, vice Democratic chair in Ottawa County, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, said concerns about Biden’s age are legitimate but Democrats need to start hammering Trump on the issue as well.
“Has anybody listened to Trump talk lately? Holy heaven … we can’t even call it word salad any more. It doesn’t even make it to the level of salad,” she said. “But, yes, of course, there is a concern anytime you’re going to elect the oldest president ever to have served.”
Still, Nagy, 65, like other battleground state Democratic officials, said she has no qualms about Biden being the party’s nominee. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod created a stir after the recent polls with a viral post on X saying Biden should decide “whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s” to continue his run for reelection.
“He is the president, he is doing the job and doing a darn fine job of it,” Nagy said. “And if, in my view, no one else that is credible and that could mount a serious campaign has chosen to run against him on the Democratic side, that tells me what I need to know.”
Allen of Cobb County, Georgia, said he feels good about Biden’s presidency but he’s concerned about turnout, particularly among Black voters who helped deliver Georgia for Biden in 2020.
“That is definitely an issue, voter turnout and getting them to come in even if they’ve got to hold their nose and vote,” said Allen, who is a Black former state representative. “Whatever you’re upset about, I can guarantee your situation is not going to improve if you give the keys back to Donald John Trump.”
There’s still time to do the work, Allen said, but he cautioned the recent polls can’t be dismissed.
“I think Democrats are disingenuous when we say it’s too far out ... because we looked at the polls this time four years ago and we were jumping up and down because Joe Biden was leading Trump,” he said. “But what I do think is that there’s way too many unknowns right now.”
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.