That means this election may, and indeed will, be just as close in many of the same states. A candidate who has an advantage there, even if only slightly, is a better candidate for the party. For example, if a Democrat the party is confident can beat Trump by one point in a battleground state, rather than losing by one point, that candidate will have a better chance of winning the White House even if he gets 2 million fewer votes in California and New York.
That’s the fundamental challenge facing the party right now: It is trying to determine whether any candidate is better able to challenge President Trump than President Biden in November’s election, even as polls continue to suggest that the other candidates, particularly Vice President Harris, have slim advantages.
I’ll explain why in a moment, but first, an important point: These advantages mean that close battleground state losses could turn into close battleground state wins, but the margins would be so small that they would necessarily be within the sampling error of any given poll. In other words, the parties are trying to find where their narrow advantages are, and polls can’t measure such narrow advantages accurately.
There’s an undeniable logic behind the party rethinking its nominee. Most Americans think Biden should abandon his candidacy, as a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Thursday showed. Biden is faring worse against Trump than he did four years ago and worse than any recent Democratic candidate at this point in the election cycle. The debate, held in late June, took place before Trump’s lead in the polling average had widened slightly.
But the same Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found Biden and Trump tied nationally, as they have been for some time. Americans (and most Democrats) think Biden should drop out of the race, but if he doesn’t, many plan to vote for him anyway. The debate intensified concerns about Biden’s age, but most of his voters have supported him primarily because he is someone who stands in opposition to Trump. To some extent, Biden’s age is baked into his candidacy, just as Trump’s criminal indictments and convictions are baked into support for him. (The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll also found that three-quarters of people who said they planned to vote for Trump said they would continue to support him even if he were sent to prison.)
Polls are necessarily a approximation of how people view political decisions. For example, when asked whether they watched the debates, six in ten respondents in our poll said they watched or listened to all or most of the debates. Those who said they paid attention to the entire debate favored Trump over Biden by a 17-point margin. Those who said they did not pay attention favored Biden by a 16-point margin.
This indicates a lack of knowledge about Biden’s debate performance, which may underpin support for Biden. But it is more likely that Trump supporters tried to emphasize the importance of the debate, while Biden supporters tried to downplay it. In other words, it is not clear which way the causal arrow points here.
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll asked registered voters how they would vote in a Biden-Trump matchup and a Harris-Trump matchup, with Biden either stepping down or replacing him at the convention. Harris is the most likely candidate, although there are other possibilities. But polling those candidates would ask voters what they think of, say, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a Democrat who half the nation has never heard of.
How did Harris fare against Trump? She had a slight edge over Biden — by 2 points overall, and by slight advantages among younger voters, non-white voters and college-educated voters — but within the margin of error in each of those subgroups.
Perhaps the two-point difference is enough to convince Democrats that Harris will necessarily do better than Biden, but judging by the margin of error, it could also be a function of the sample used in the poll. Whitmer may do better, but we’ll have to get her out there and campaign to introduce herself to voters to know that.
Of course, Democrats always want to win the presidential election, but that desire is especially strong this year. Trump is deeply unpopular within the party and has a clear disregard for American democracy. If there is a candidate who can clearly perform better than Biden in November’s election, it would make sense for the party to support him.
But objective data cannot document such a shift, and Biden’s rivalry with Trump meant that the other candidates’ approval ratings did not drop as dramatically after the debate, highlighting the fact that the other candidates’ approval ratings would be much higher.
The party has no choice but to act on its instincts. Biden certainly risks seeming inferior to other candidates and exacerbating concerns about his age, but no one can say for sure that the others would do much better.
