For now at least, the November presidential election is still between President Joe Biden and former and potentially future President Donald Trump. While Trump has consistently held an overall lead against Biden for months in many of the national polls we've seen and in key battleground states necessary to win the election, that lead has increased following the disastrous debate performance from Biden last Thursday.
On Wednesday, a poll from The New York Times/Siena College came out showing Trump with a lead of 49-43 percent among likely voters and 49 to 41 percent among registered voters.
In case those numbers don't seem bad enough for Biden, the headline for that write-up reads "Trump Widens Lead After Biden’s Debate Debacle, Times/Siena Poll Finds."
To start, the piece gets into just how significant those numbers are, as well as the percentage of voters who have concerns with Biden's age and his ability to do the job:
Donald J. Trump’s lead in the 2024 presidential race has widened after President Biden’s fumbling debate performance last week, as concerns that Mr. Biden is too old to govern effectively rose to new heights among Democrats and independent voters, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed.
Mr. Trump now leads Mr. Biden 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from just a week earlier, before the debate. It is the largest lead Mr. Trump has recorded in a Times/Siena poll since 2015. Mr. Trump leads by even more among registered voters, 49 percent to 41 percent.
Doubts about Mr. Biden’s age and acuity are widespread and growing. A majority of every demographic, geographic and ideological group in the poll — including Black voters and those who said they will still be voting for him — believe Mr. Biden, 81, is too old to be effective.
Overall, 74 percent of voters view him as too old for the job, up five percentage points since the debate. Concerns about Mr. Biden’s age have spiked eight percentage points among Democrats in the week since the debate, to 59 percent. The share of independent voters who said they felt that way rose to 79 percent, nearly matching the Republican view of the president.
The poll offers early empirical evidence of what many Democrats have feared: That Mr. Biden’s faltering debate performance has further imperiled his chances against Mr. Trump this fall. Some Democratic lawmakers and donors are raising questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness following his struggles to finish his thoughts or articulate a vision during the debate, and they are demanding that Mr. Biden prove for a skeptical public that he is capable of serving until he is 86.
Even the parts of the poll that are considered to be " a couple of faint glimmers of good news" should be taken with a grain of salt.
As the write-up goes on to note [Emphasis added]:
One was that he narrowed Mr. Trump’s edge among independent voters, even if that gain was more than offset by his erosion among Democrats and Mr. Trump’s improvement among Republicans. Another was that the share of Democratic voters who think Mr. Biden should no longer be the nominee ticked up, but by far less than the rising Democratic concern about his age. The first calls from Capitol Hill lawmakers for him to step aside came on Tuesday.
Overall, more voters thought Mr. Biden should remain the Democratic nominee — but only because more Republicans, perhaps emboldened after the debate, said they now want him as their opponent.
Among leaners, Trump still leads with Independents by 47-37 percent among registered voters, while he leads 45-42 with Independents among likely voters.
When it comes to registered Democratic voters, they're about evenly split if they want Biden to remain the nominee, 48-47 percent. Before the debate, those numbers were at 52-47 percent.
Among overall registered voters, just 31 percent think he should remain the nominee, while 60 percent say "there should be a different Democratic nominee."
Slightly more likely voters (34 percent) and Democrats who are likely voters (52 percent) say Biden should remain the nominee, though a majority of overall likely voters (57 percent) think there should be a different nominee, and 45 percent of Democratic likely voters want a different nominee.
Those who voted for Biden in 2020 look to want a different nominee, with 49 percent of registered voters and likely voters who voted for the president in the last election saying so, a plurality for each.
Twenty-eight percent of registered Republican voters and 30 percent of likely voters who are Republican think Biden should remain the nominee. And while they may be "emboldened after the debate," it would be wise for Republicans to not get too cocky. That being said, Biden insisted on Wednesday that he plans to stay in the race.
Seventy-four percent of registered and likely voters agree "Joe Biden is just too old to be an effective president," including 53 percent of registered voters and 52 percent of likely voters who "strongly agree." Fifty-nine percent of registered Democrats agree, as do 60 percent of Democrats who are likely voters.
The write-up pointed to findings about the debate as well:
Those who said they had watched the CNN debate, which was held in Atlanta, said Mr. Trump outperformed Mr. Biden, 60 percent to 22 percent.
Only 16 percent of voters said Mr. Biden did well, and a meager 3 percent said he did very well. In an era of intense partisanship, even Democrats felt that Mr. Biden had flopped.
The debate was watched live by more than 50 million Americans, and 59 percent of voters said they had tuned in. Only 10 percent said they had not heard about the debate, 15 percent said they had heard about it and another 16 percent said they had watched clips afterward.
Among those who watched or heard about the debate, the majority of registered voters (57 percent) and likely voters (58 percent), believe Biden performed "not well at all," giving him a net "not well" grade of 81 percent among registered voters and likely voters. Even Biden's fellow Democrats weren't too happy with his performance, as 61 percent of those registered and likely voters gave him a net "not well" grade.
For Trump, a small plurality of registered voters (29 percent) and likely voters (28 percent) who watched or heard about the debate said he did "somewhat well." Overall, he had a 51 percent net "well" rating among registered voters and a 52 percent net "well" rating among likely voters.
As we've seen with plenty of other polls, overall this poll is bad news for Biden:
The Biden campaign had hoped that the debate — and seeing Mr. Trump onstage in a way he hasn’t been seen since he occupied the White House — would pull some of the Democratic voters who have been reluctant to support Mr. Biden in 2024 back into the fold.
The poll, which like all others is a snapshot in time, did not show any Democratic consolidation.
Mr. Biden’s standing in the poll did improve among Black voters, but it eroded among Hispanic voters, although the sample size of both demographic groups was relatively small in the survey.
When it comes to Mr. Biden’s fitness for another term, 77 percent of Democrats under 45 think the president is too old to be effective, while only 49 percent of those older than 45 agree.
Similarly, 56 percent of Democrats under 45 approve of Mr. Biden’s job, while 90 percent of Democrats older than that rated him positively.
The debate did succeed in another Biden goal: Getting voters to tune into the race. The share of voters paying a lot of attention to the campaign was jolted up 9 percentage points in the wake of the much-discussed debate.
More voters said in the poll that re-electing Mr. Biden in November would be a risky choice for the country than those who said it of Mr. Trump. In the survey, 63 percent of voters said Mr. Biden was a risky choice, compared to 56 percent who said Mr. Trump was risky.
Roughly one in four Democrats said Mr. Biden was a risky choice rather than a safe one; they were nearly twice as likely to think of Mr. Biden as risky as Republicans were to view Mr. Trump that way.
That it was actually a "Biden goal" to get "voters to tune into the race" is shocking, given how much it backfired. As voters "tune into the race," they seem to see how much of a danger it would be to give Biden another four-year term when it's becoming increasingly doubtful he'll even last that long.
Such a write-up wasn't the only damning piece from The New York Times about this poll. Also on Wednesday, Nate Cohn wrote a piece pointing out how "The Debate Hurt Biden, but the Real Shift Has Been Happening for Years."
Cohn's piece also addresses a Biden campaign talking point, to use it against them:
In the wake of the first presidential debate, a chorus of top Biden allies and campaign officials has advanced a simple message: The race has not fundamentally changed.
In a sense, they’re right.
...
Mr. Biden is not a broadly acceptable candidate anymore, the polling shows, and as a consequence he no longer leads Mr. Trump. Long before the debate, his approval and favorability ratings plunged deep into the danger zone for an incumbent. More ominously, his numbers were falling even though the conditions for a Biden comeback always seemed to be around the corner. Inflation was subsiding. The general election was heating up. On paper, an incumbent should have been the favorite — and his opponent was a candidate accused of multiple crimes, and recently convicted of a felony.
But today, his approval rating stands nearly a net 10 points lower than it was ahead of the 2022 midterm election, when inflation was over 7 percent. With the economy and consumer confidence improved since then, perhaps the best remaining explanation for this steady erosion is growing concern about his age.
By every measure, the poll finds that the debate took yet another toll on the public’s already diminished view of him. His favorability rating fell two points after the debate, to 36 percent from 38 percent. By contrast, it was 52 percent in the final Times/Siena poll before the 2020 election.
The poll was conducted June 28-July 2 with 1,532 registered voters. There was a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points among registered voters and plus or minus 2.9 percentage points among likely voters.
Following the debate, The New York Times has been among those liberal mainstream media outlets raising concerns about the president, and they've been more critical of him than one might think in recent months, earning the ire of the White House and Biden surrogates. It's also worth reminding they've also been complicit in covering up for the White House's narratives, though.
The same day that the poll was released, the MAGA Inc. PAC sent out a press release how Trump is not only up 49-43 percent among likely voters in this poll, but that a poll from The Wall Street Journal shows him leading Biden 48-42 percent with voters, and leading by 49-43 percent against Biden per a CNN poll.
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 28, 2024
