Voters sour on Biden polls show after debate debacle

Insights from Politico, The New York Times, and Axios

The News

Less than a week after US President Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s first presidential debate, the first polling is starting to trickle in.

Democratic-leaning voters are now less likely to vote for Biden in November’s election, one survey found. Meanwhile, the share of Democrats who do not think Biden should be running for re-election also jumped 10 points, according to a separate poll from CBS News.

More than half (55%) of the party said he should still be the nominee, but 45% said he should step aside, that poll found. Looking at the total electorate, 72% of voters now say Biden shouldn’t run. That’s also up from February, when 63% reported that.

SIGNALS

Biden campaign damage-control effort not landing with key constituencies

Biden and his campaign have spent the days since the debate trying to calm Democrats’ nerves. At one event, Biden acknowledged he had a bad night, but downplayed its importance. Not everyone agrees with this tactic. “The ‘it’s no big deal’ response is not reassuring anyone,” MSNBC political analyst Bredan Buck posted on X. Meanwhile, some influential donors have argued Democrats’ hand-wringing will only help Trump. “If we’re musing on Biden’s flaws, we’re not organizing around Trump’s flaws. That’s bad for us and good for them,” The New York Times reported LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman saying.

Initial polling could be an overreaction

The campaign’s spin so far is that Biden’s poor debate performance is being overblown in the media, and that “voters had a different reaction.” The campaign has also sought to get ahead of any bad polling, with a Saturday memo from Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon saying: “If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls.” Politico also noted that the first post-debate surveys are “likely to overstate the magnitude of [Biden’s] decline — just as they oversold his lead after his first debate against Donald Trump four years ago.”

It’s too soon to know what’s coming next

Thursday was the earliest presidential debate in history, and it’s still too soon to know how this will shake out. FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average shows that Trump remains ahead by a small margin, with 41.3% of voters supporting him over 40.7% for Biden. Regardless of the polls or media narrative, there are only a handful of people who have Biden’s ear on this matter, as Axios and Semafor’s Ben Smith have noted. “There are many moments that could still reshape the campaign and they will determine whether Biden’s bad night will prove fatal or not,” experts from the Brookings Institute wrote.