These questions are crucial to the country, but in the cold political calculations they are secondary to his party. Instead, Democrats are trying to determine whether Biden can still beat Trump, despite the debates—or, more accurately, despite the debates raising questions about Biden’s age. Second, the party is trying to determine which Democrat is most likely to beat Trump. If Biden were to be replaced, the purpose would clearly be to improve the party’s chances of victory.
But these are very difficult questions to answer. Because Biden and Trump are still relatively neck and neck, and because it’s very hard to predict how a race will play out when a new candidate is suddenly thrust into the spotlight, it’s hard to know who has a better position to run against Trump than Biden. A CNN poll this week showed VP Harris doing better than Biden and other commonly mentioned Democrats, but only by a small margin relative to the margin of error. It’s simply impossible to say. So the party is driven more by emotion than anything else, in part because the shock of the debate is lingering.
we can The debate did not improve Biden’s chances. There are only a few events in the presidential election where candidates can expect to attract a lot of attention. The debate is one of them. Biden went into the debate almost neck and neck with Trump and needed to take the lead. Biden did not take the lead, but it is not entirely clear to what extent he lost ground.
It could also be said that the poll that has perhaps the greatest influence on the minds of Democratic elected officials and activists shows Biden losing: a New York Times/Siena College poll, which, thanks to the prominence of its sponsors, often dominates discussions of the state of the race on the left.
The Times polled Americans before and after the debate to see how things have changed. Among likely voters, the change has been subtle: Trump had a 4-point lead before the debate; now he’s ahead by 6. It’s not a statistically significant change, but it’s also not a sign that Biden has done his job.
A quick look at the polls shows what the shift was among certain voting groups: for example, there was a big shift in support for Trump among men (highlighted in the Times poll report), Hispanic Americans and younger voters, while there was a big shift in the opposite direction among black Americans.
But here’s a word of caution: First, the poll has a large margin of error because it includes fewer black and Hispanic respondents.
More importantly, the post-debate numbers for men, young voters and black voters mirror those in the Times’ April poll: Men supported Trump by 20 points then; they support him by 23 points now. Black voters supported Biden by 60 points then; they support him by 65 points now. Young voters supported Biden by 2 points then; they support him by 3 points now. In contrast, Hispanic voters’ views of the candidates have not returned to the levels of three months ago.
A central issue raised during the debate was whether views of Biden’s fitness to be president had changed. Views have changed, but again, largely among the groups listed above. Majorities of Hispanic voters now say Biden’s age is an issue and that he would not be able to handle the presidency well, as do men.
Now, to raise the stakes a bit, I think that perhaps other candidates are better able to counter Trump (for example, Harris tends to be popular with young voters and voters of color, among whom Biden has disproportionately low approval ratings), and I also think that Biden is unlikely to beat Trump at this point, especially given the role of the Electoral College (more on this in a moment). But I also acknowledge that the numbers above don’t concretely support these assumptions.
Plus, last week I warned about relying too much on a single poll, and that warning remains valid, no matter how tempting it may be to dig deep into the polls like a fortune teller presented with a pile of animal innards. So let’s look instead at the average of 538 polls nationwide and in the five states that leaned to Biden in 2020.
Here the vertical axis has been purposely compressed to show movement, and indeed there is movement.
Since the debate, Trump has increased his lead by about 2 percentage points. Because the 538 state-level averages are derived in part from national averages (as national changes tend to spill over to the states), Biden has lost support in all five states in these averages. But these changes mirror those seen after the first debates in 2012 and 2020.
There is plenty of evidence right now that the debates have made the Democrats worse off, if only because, as the most hopelessly optimistic Democrats say, they have not helped the incumbent president gain support. Unfortunately for panicked Democrats, the polls don’t do much to answer the question above about whether Biden can’t beat Trump or which Democrat is better placed to win.
The group is charging towards what appears to be a cliff, but they can’t see beyond it.
