The polls are in: President Joe BidenThe senators’ abrupt decision during the debate has left him in his worst electoral shape for the 2024 election.
More voters than ever have negative views of the president, believe he is too old for the job and want someone else to lead the Democratic ticket this fall.
No sitting president has had such a low approval rating at this stage of the election since George H.W. Bush more than three decades ago — and aside from Biden’s 2024 opponent, former President Donald TrumpNot since Jimmy Carter was re-elected 44 years ago has a sitting senator fallen so far behind in the polls.
The latest numbers have ramped up the pressure on Biden to bounce back quickly — or drop out of the race before his party formally selects a nominee. A series of rigorous but rapid polls show a post-debate slide for Biden — who was already struggling to pull away from Trump. Three of them, including a New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday afternoon, showed Trump with a 6-point lead among likely voters.
Given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College, such a national margin would likely result in a decisive victory for Trump.
The New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump ahead of Biden among likely voters, 49 percent to 43 percent, up from a 3-point lead before the debate. That’s a real — but not overwhelming — shift that’s consistent with other polls conducted after Biden’s debate with Trump. A few other recent polls have shown Biden slipping, but by slightly smaller margins.
Each poll differs slightly from the others, including in methodology. But together they paint a bleak picture: The sitting president, who has struggled for months to close a stubborn polling gap, has now fallen further behind.
Biden’s small drop, already maligned by Republicans, appears to be coming largely from self-identified Democrats and independents. Normally, these would be the easiest voters to win back for Biden. But his broader commitments make that difficult.
Here’s what you need to know about Biden’s post-debate polls:
The polls haven’t changed all that much, but it’s a significant shift
Quantifying the size of Trump’s post-debate surge and Biden’s decline is more complicated than it seems.
Some of the new polls, like those from CNN and The Wall Street Journal, come from outlets whose most recent trend lines go back months, meaning changes in the numbers can reflect much more than just the debate. And the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics averages — which are intentionally slower measures — still include pre-debate polls.
These high-quality polls are the most useful for understanding the current state of the race, and they show a solid Trump lead.
The Wall Street Journal had not examined the race since February, but Trump’s 6-point lead in the post-debate poll was larger than the 2-point lead in the previous poll.
And while CNN’s Trump +6 poll is unchanged from its previous poll in April, it underscores that the debate, even at best, was a missed opportunity.
Five pollsters who conducted a pre-debate poll in June also conducted a post-debate poll. This helps us understand the debate’s effects. Four of them show Trump with a small lead, but none by more than four points.
These are not the huge swings that sometimes occur after major events in past elections, but they are significant.
After all, it is not unusual for polls to go against the candidate who is generally seen as the ‘loser’ of a televised debate. This is partly because the debate is still fresh in the minds of voters and partly because the candidate’s supporters are less likely to respond to polls after a poor performance.
Since the debate, the Biden campaign has warned the media — and nervous Democrats — that a string of bad polls was coming, pointing to historical and political science research showing that “nonresponse bias” — changes in response patterns that lead to a drop in support for a candidate after a bad debate because fewer of that candidate’s voters respond to pollsters — would exaggerate the lasting damage to Biden.
But that may not be the case here. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn reported that self-identified Democrats and Republicans responded to the new survey at about the same rate. That’s just one poll, but it suggests that Biden’s small drop isn’t the result of an attempt to poll immediately after a major news event.
Biden’s polling position is even worse when you consider how hard it is to gain ground in this election
Voters are familiar with both candidates for the 2020 re-run. Biden and Trump have been neck-and-neck in the polls for months, with only minor changes.
While polls show voters saw Trump win last week’s debate by a three-to-one margin, major changes in the race were always unlikely amid intense polarization.
Since its launch in March, FiveThirtyEight’s Biden-Trump polling average has moved within an extremely narrow range: Trump +2.4 points to Biden +0.3 points. (The range currently stands at Trump +2.3 points, just shy of its peak.)
Biden had built a small lead in the weeks after Trump’s conviction in May, but that jump has been quickly erased since the debate. Biden now sits in a gap larger than all but two sitting senators dating back to 1980: Carter and Trump, both of whom were defeated for re-election.
Biden’s campaign was eager to seize on results that showed only modest drops in the president’s standing since the debate. In an effort to get ahead of the New York Times/Siena poll on Wednesday, a memo from top campaign officials to staffers highlighted those smaller shifts and warned that “it will take a couple of weeks” to determine how the debate affected the race.
But that also obscures a fundamental reality: Biden was losing by a narrow margin before the debate, and now he’s losing by an even wider margin.
That’s a particularly tough situation for a candidate who has had little success making up ground in the polls, even after spending nearly $115 million on advertising so far, according to AdImpact.
In a race likely to be decided by the narrowest of margins, Biden needed an event that could cut through the noise and shake things up. He challenged Trump to a debate and helped set the rules. Tens of millions of Americans watched. And the gamble backfired.
A Biden recovery could be particularly difficult
Debate surges and troughs often prove fleeting. But there are hints hidden in the new polls that the damage to Biden’s candidacy may be more lasting.
Biden is now less popular than Trump — 37 percent of likely voters in the New York Times/Siena poll view Biden favorably, compared with 43 percent for Trump — a significant reversal from the 2020 election, when Biden held a sizable lead in image ratings. And across the board, polls show an increase in the share of voters who say he is too old to run for a second term, including 80 percent in a new Wall Street Journal survey — including a whopping three in four Democrats.
It can be particularly difficult to shake off such a fundamentally negative view of a candidate, especially when a significant majority of your own party believes you are too old to run for re-election.
And significantly more voters now see Biden as a risk over the next four years than see Trump as an equal risk — despite Biden’s claims that a second Trump presidency would “bring chaos” to the country. In the New York Times/Siena College poll, just 37 percent said Biden was a “safe choice” for president, while 61 percent called him a “risky choice.” As for Trump, 43 percent said he is a “safe choice” and 55 percent said he is a “risky choice.”
Of course, the most heated final phase of the race has not yet begun. The final four months of the campaign offer Biden a series of key events to turn the tide, starting with Friday’s ABC News interview and continuing through both party conventions this summer.
But for Democrats hoping Biden would return soon, the polls offer plenty of warning signs, from the horse race to other damning perceptions about Biden’s fitness for the job.
