Biden post-debate dip continues, as more polls show voters thrown by his performance
The hits just keep coming for President Joe Biden’s poll numbers.
Amid calls from across the political spectrum for him to move aside and make way for a younger candidate, a slew of new polls landed Wednesday morning, each showing the president’s poor performance at last Thursday’s CNN debate is having more of an impact than his campaign staff would like people to believe.
On top of several polls taken in the days after Biden’s disastrous display and released earlier this week, on Wednesday pollsters with Yahoo News/YouGov, CBS News, and the New York Times/Siena piled on, all agreeing that Biden is slipping further behind former President Donald Trump.
“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,” the Times wrote.
According to CBS, Biden is losing all of the state’s he’ll need to claim an electoral college victory in 2024.
“The race for president has shifted in Donald Trump’s direction following the first 2024 presidential debate. Trump now has a 3-point edge over President Biden across the battleground states collectively, and a 2-point edge nationally,” they wrote.
Yahoo’s pollsters say Biden was winning before the debate, according to the last round of polling. Now?
“The new, post-debate Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows Biden (43%) slipping back to where he was late last year, when Trump led 44% to 42%. And Biden (40%) continues to trail Trump (44%) — by a slightly larger margin than last month,” they wrote.
Those polls follow similar surveys published Tuesday by CNN, USA Today/Suffolk, and polling released Monday by Harvard/Harris and Morning Consult, each showing Trump’s lead on the incumbent president growing.
Over the previous two days, calls for Biden to step aside moved from those of columnists and analysts to officials within the party itself. U.S. Rep. Lloy Doggett, of Texas, became the first Democratic member of Congress to do call for Biden to withdraw when he did so on Tuesday.
That was followed Wednesday by a congressman closer to Biden: Rep. James Clayburn, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina and a co-chair of Biden’s campaign. He suggested a “mini-primary” featuring Vice President Kamala Harris, governors and others ahead of the party’s convention in August.
“You can actually fashion the process that’s already in place to make it a mini-primary and I would support that,” Clyburn said in an interview with CNN Wednesday.
According to information provided by RealClearPolitics, a week before the debate, on average, Biden was within a single point of Trump. In the week since the debate Trump has gained a full point and half, and now leads by 2.5 points on average.
On Sunday, CBS published a poll showing 72% of voters think Biden should step aside and that he isn’t fit to fulfill the duties of his office. That number includes nearly half of polled Democrats.
According to reporting by the New York Times, Biden is aware of how bad things went on stage. Citing “a key ally” to the president granted anonymity to speak about the matter, the Times says Biden is “seriously considering whether he can recover after a devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta” and that he is “weighing whether to continue in the race.”
The “key ally” spoke to the president, according to the Times, and said that Biden only has a few days to correct the course of his tumbling campaign numbers: “He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a different place.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said that information is “absolutely false.”
A second debate is scheduled for September 10.
In the meantime, Biden is on the campaign trail trying to sell voters on a new message in which he acknowledges that he’s not as able as he once was, but claims to still be up for the challenge of holding the Oval Office through another four-year term.
“I know I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to. But here’s what I also know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job. And I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get kicked down, you get back up,” he told supporters at a weekend fundraiser in New York.
Biden-Harris 2024 inter pollsters Molly Murphy told MSNBC that Biden’s slump won’t last.
“In modern campaigns, singular moments do not spell the outcome of any race. Whether it’s a debate, whether it is a scandal, whether it is an individual hot mic moment. Any of those things we love to say and cover these like they are going to fundamentally change the trajectory of the race. They will potentially bump the polls up or down in one direction or another, and that may last a week or two,” she said.
The 45th President’s campaign says that we’re witnessing the “total collapse of the Democratic Party.”
“”Every Democrat who is calling on Crooked Joe Biden to quit was once a supporter of Biden and his failed policies that lead to extreme inflation, an open border, and chaos at home and abroad. Make no mistake that Democrats, the mainstream media, and the swamp colluded to hide the truth from the American public – Joe Biden is weak, failed, dishonest, and not fit for the White House. Every one of them has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive state and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years, especially Cackling Copilot Kamala Harris,” MAGA 2024 Campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a joint statement.