Joe Biden Betting Odds Falling Sharply After Miserable Week

Presidential election betting odds for Joe Biden have taken a notable downturn in the wake of Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Robert Hur’s recent report, according to RealClearPolitics.

On Thursday, Hur released his report about the Biden classified documents case, which emerged after materials from his time as vice president under President Barack Obama were found at his home in Delaware and his Penn Biden Center office in Washington, D.C., in November 2022 and January 2023. Hur declined to pursue charges against the president, exonerating him for the retention of the materials, but nevertheless kicked up a political firestorm with brief passages detailing interactions with Biden, with the special counsel characterizing him as an “elderly” man with a fading memory.

This characterization played into the prevailing sentiment surrounding Biden that he, as the oldest individual to ever hold the presidency, is too old for the job and has declining mental faculties. The president himself and numerous members of his administration strongly denounced this aspect of the report as inaccurate and an irrelevant overstep on Hur’s part. Some observers also accused Hur, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump, of acting in a politically motivated manner to hurt Biden’s reelection odds. Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the DOJ’s investigation in an effort to ensure a non-partisan investigation.

Meanwhile after being indicted by the DOJ last year, Trump has pled not guilty to 40 federal charges related to claims he unlawfully retained classified documents after leaving the White House in January 2021 and then obstructed efforts to return these papers to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In August 2022, FBI agents raided the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida from which they recovered several classified documents.

RealClearPolitics is a website known for aggregating polling data for numerous elections, often presenting them in the form of “betting odds,” with the odds of each candidate’s success being represented in the form of a percentage. In the wake of Hur’s report, the site’s odds for Biden securing the Democratic nomination and winning in the general election have both tumbled to a notable degree.

For the Democratic nomination, which Biden is still overwhelmingly tipped to secure, RealClearPolitics’ listing for the president dropped to around 60 percent as of Sunday afternoon, down from a peak of around 73 percent just four days ago. The statistics are somewhat skewed by the fact that they account for individuals who are not currently running for the nomination, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and former first lady Michelle Obama. Newsom has frequently denied that he has any intention of running for president this year, and Obama has often expressed a distaste for politics.

For the general election, the site’s odds for Biden dropped to around 26 percent from around 33 percent over the same time frame. The site still favors Trump, the likely GOP nominee, to win the general election by a considerable degree, with around 44 percent. Notably, however, RealClearPolitics has been accused in recent years, particularly since Trump took office in 2017, of shifting toward a conservative bias, though former employees told The New York Times in 2020 that they never felt any pressure to bias their content.

Newsweek reached out to the White House press office via email for comment.

Other major polls have generally shown Biden and Trump to be neck-and-neck in a hypothetical general election match-up. While an increasing number of polls had recently trended towards a slight Trump edge, a major recent poll from Quinnipiac University gave Biden a considerable six-point lead, with 50 percent support among registered voters surveyed against 44 percent for Trump.