It’s wise to be skeptical of the polls that have followed Thursday’s presidential debate. The people who watched the debate tend to be partisans whose minds were already made up. It takes longer for clips and impressions to filter out to voters who pay less attention to politics.
Still, a few things stand out from the early numbers. First is that no matter which snap poll you look at, the race looks stable. That’s not because voters think President Biden performed well or even because they think he’s fit for the job. Poll after poll shows they think he lost the debate, and badly, and he’s too old to serve a second term. But so far it’s not leading to a significant swing toward Donald Trump. For Biden voters, a candidate whose fitness seems uncertain is better than a candidate whose malignancy is known.
A new Data for Progress poll is particularly interesting. It, too, found that voters thought Trump had won the debate. It, too, found that most voters believe Biden is too old to serve another term as president. It found that voters were more concerned by Biden’s age and health than by Trump’s criminal cases and potential threat to democracy. And it found a mostly unchanged race; Trump led Biden by three points.
The poll went further, though. It tested other Democrats against Trump: Vice President Kamala Harris performed identically to Biden. Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer all performed about the same, trailing Trump by two to three points. But the similar margins obscure how lesser-known Democrats would change the race: 7 percent of voters were undecided about a Biden-Trump or Harris-Trump race, but between 9 percent and 12 percent of voters were undecided in the other matchups. More voters are up for grabs.
Democrats could read these results in two ways. The line from the Biden camp has been that Biden’s bad night won’t lead anyone to vote for Trump. The other way to read these results is that the base support for the Democratic alternative to Trump is pretty sturdy. Perhaps Democrats should be less worried about the possible fractures of an open convention and more interested in its possibilities.
For Democrats, fear of Trump is a powerful motivator. It generates a unity and energy completely separate from the Democratic nominee. But it’s not enough. Biden trails in most polls, as do other Democrats. There’s a crucial group of 7 percent to 12 percent of voters who do not fear Trump enough to vote for the Democratic nominee simply by default. They need to be won over.
The question Democrats need to be asking themselves is: Which candidate stands the best chance of winning those voters over?
Thursday’s debate was the Biden campaign’s high-risk gamble to show he was up to the job. It proved he isn’t. Even so, Democrats have feared that their base is fragile enough that an unpredictable process to replace Biden might fracture their support. But what the polls seem to show is that anti-Trump voters will stick by a Democrat, and a larger share of voters are open to Democrats if the party picks a more compelling candidate.
The polls may change sharply in the coming days, and I’ve heard rumors of internal Democratic polls that show significantly worse post-debate numbers for Biden. It’ll take some time yet to know where the race will settle. And it’s not as if Trump is standing still: He’s near to finalizing his V.P. pick.
