President Joe Biden has a lot riding on Thursday night’s first presidential debate amid fresh evidence of his political weakness.
On the eve of the debate, two new national polls had former President Donald Trump ahead of Biden. Quinnipiac showed Trump up 4 percentage points, with 49% to the incumbent’s 45%.
A New York Times-Siena College poll also released on Wednesday found Trump with 48% to Biden’s 44% among likely voters. In a pattern seen throughout this cycle but in a change for Republicans compared to previous elections, Trump’s lead grows to 6 points when looking at registered voters. The former president has a 7-point advantage with independents.
Both top-line numbers show Trump taking a larger share of the popular vote than in either of the previous two presidential elections. If his lead holds through November, he would be only the second Republican presidential nominee to do so since 1988 and the first non-Bush since Ronald Reagan won by 18 points in a 49-state landslide in 1984.
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Nevertheless, it is the Electoral College that will elect the next president. Trump is up by more than 3 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average of the top battleground states. A Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin voters released Wednesday showed Biden up by 2 in a two-way race but Trump leading by the same margin once various third-party candidates are included.
These latest numbers represent a slight reversal of fortune for Biden. A recent Fox News poll gave the president a 2-point lead over Trump, who had appeared to take a modest hit in several surveys after his criminal conviction in New York. “If the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied. So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point,” political prognosticator Nate Silver wrote on Wednesday (emphasis in the original).
“Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College,” Silver continued. “In fact, the race looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored [former President Barack] Obama and gave him the far more robust map.”
In that race, Obama beat Mitt Romney in all the battleground states except for North Carolina, including now safe-Trump states like Ohio and Florida.
This year, there is some polling evidence that Trump is threatening Biden in Virginia, which hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004 and went for the current president by 10 points in 2020, and Minnesota, which hasn’t gone red at the presidential level since Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972.
Silver’s election model currently gives Trump a 66% chance of winning, the forecaster announced Wednesday.
While Trump is taking a risk by jumping at the chance to debate Biden regardless of moderators or ground rules, Thursday night’s showdown is no sure bet for the sitting president either. Biden might be debating because he is losing. The 81-year-old cannot afford to do anything that deepens concerns about his age.
Biden looking like less than a sure thing against Trump has been a persistent source of unease among Democrats and liberal pundits. The latter group has frequently speculated about ways Biden could be replaced at the Democratic National Convention. While this seems remote, Thursday night’s debate will take place before Biden is officially the nominee.
Not only is the president unique because of his age, jittery Democratic operatives and allied commentators observe, but the party’s battleground state Senate candidates appear to be holding up well, making the presidential race a Biden-centric problem. Top Democrats also fret about Biden’s campaign strategy.
When Biden last faced these doubts following a raft of bad polls and a special counsel’s report that made him sound like a doddering old man who was too feeble to be charged for mishandling classified documents, he mostly calmed them with his State of the Union performance.
Biden will need to bring that kind of energy, or at least that type of expectations management, against Trump to stave off doubters. Biden has done well in big moments before, which is what triggers Republican accusations that his handlers somehow drug him before major events. But the White House does give him a noticeably lighter public schedule before such occasions, and this time has been no different. Biden has been tucked away for days cramming for the debate.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) weathered a poor debate performance before the midterm elections on his way to a Senate victory, though early voting likely helped. Reagan bounced back from a shaky first debate in 1984 to swat away age concerns in the second one.
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But Biden may need to alter the dynamics of the race more than either of those candidates and his camp’s theory is this will be the first time voters really start paying attention.
If they are correct, Biden cannot afford to take a mulligan.
