President Joe Biden in recent days has maintained that he has a strong chance of winning reelection, but surveys in key states show the presidential race tilting toward former President Donald Trump.

The shift is especially stark in Pennsylvania, where he has trailed Trump in every poll conducted since Bidens poor showing in the June 27 debate.

He has insisted things are fine.

If you look at all the polling data, the polling data shows a lot of different things, but theres no wide gap between us, Biden told NBC News Lester Holt on Monday. Its essentially a toss-up race.

But Bidens more optimistic assertion in a Saturday meeting with a group of moderate House Democrats that he led the last three national polls by four points is simply incorrect. In national polls, Biden went from a tie with Trump to trailing him by 2 percentage points.

He is in a significantly worse position today than he was the day before the debate, said Lakshya Jain, a co-founder of the democratic polling and analysis firm Split Ticket, which does not have any political clients. The debate was supposed to be the inflection point and it was, but in the wrong way for Biden.

At the same time, while Bidens Democratic detractors had been counting on a dramatic shift in public opinion to help convince him to step aside, they have not received it. Bidens slide in the polls has been very incremental, leaving him within the margin of error in the Great Lakes states of Michigan , Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the three states most essential for victory in November. There has even been at least one set of battleground state polling conducted by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult in early July that showed Biden gaining ground on Trump since the debate, though still trailing him in the seven swing states surveyed.

Trump is favored, but its not an over race, said Avery James, a data research analyst at Echelon Insights, a mainstream Republican firm that does not have any current clients active in the presidential race. Thats been useful to Bidens inner circle to secure him the nomination. They can basically look at that and say, Oh, the damage isnt that severe.

In a polling memo on Saturday, Biden deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said that polling since the debate showed the race tied.

Weve said since the beginning that this will be a close race, which is why we have a campaign that is designed to win a close race, Fulks wrote, pointing to the campaigns plans for $50 million of TV ads this month plus 2,000 coordinated staffers in battleground states, which he described as an operation that dwarfs Trumps.

Several Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, are so concerned that Biden will lose that theyve said he should step aside so someone else can be the partys nominee. So far, 18 House Democrats and one Senate Democrat have said Biden should withdraw less than 10% of all Democrats on Capitol Hill.

The latest data makes it clear that the political peril to Democrats is escalating, Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) wrote in an op-ed calling on Biden to drop from the race . States that were once strongholds are now leaning Republican.

No lawmakers have made similar announcements since Saturdays assassination attempt on Trump, an event that also prompted the Biden campaign to pause its advertising and communications.

On Tuesday, however, new signs of Democratic discontent emerged when lawmakers began circulating a letter asking the Democratic National Committee to postpone a planned virtual roll call that would allow Biden to formally clinch the nomination ahead of the partys convention next month. The letter warned that the virtual roll call could start as soon as this weekend.