“Four things to remember about post-debate polls”, The Washington Post
It’s still early to judge whether Biden’s poor performance weakened his position — but lots of reason to think it won’t.
Analysis by Philip Bump, National columnist, July 1, 2024
For people closely tracking the 2024 presidential contest, it was inevitable that the conclusion of Thursday’s night’s debate would prompt curiosity about how the race might have been affected.
No matter what happened in the debate, that would have been the case; debates are one of a handful of scheduled events that might shift the trajectory of the contest. But then, of course, President Biden offered a wobbly performance that reinforced questions about his age, the central weakness of his candidacy. The question of impact demanded an immediate answer, given calls for Biden to step aside.
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There were polls that immediately reinforced what seemed obvious, that Donald Trump had fared better over the course of the encounter. Biden supporters interested in doing so, though, could find solace elsewhere, in a televised focus group showing gains for the incumbent or in pollingshowing that Biden fared about as well as other well-known Democrats.
But this sort of temperature-taking is imprecise, either not measuring the actual presidential race or not measuring the race after the debate. Given the interest in understanding what the effects of the debate might be, it’s worth articulating what observers might expect.
1. It would take a while to see movement.
There’s a weird inconsistency in how many Americans view polling. They expect — thanks in part to often unscrupulous pollsters — to have instant assessments of major events while scoffing at polls they dislike by noting how unlikely it is that anyone would participate in polls.
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There’s some truth to that latter point. It’s not the case that modern polls depend on people picking up landlines, a criticism that survives despite having been addressed years ago. Modern polling employs several techniques aimed at reaching respondents, but doing so is slow and time-intensive. In other words, you should not expect a number of quality assessments of an event immediately after that event occurs simply because it takes time to conduct those assessments.
That sits alongside the other obvious point: that the effects of an event are not all immediate. Something like a poor debate performance (or perceptions thereof) take some time to trickle outward, even in the internet age. Views of Thursday’s debate assessed Thursday night will probably not mirror perceptions a few days later.
What’s more, using individual polls as assessments of a significant event means relying on a single pollster’s assessment of who’s likely to vote or how the results should be interpreted. Polling averages often provide a more accurate assessment of the state of an election — but that accuracy necessarily requires more polling. Which means more time.
2. It’s likely that there won’t be much movement.
The Washington Post has a polling average of our own. Since the beginning of the year, it has shown Trump with a national lead of about a point … consistently. Our methodology is different from others that have shown more volatility, like that from 538. But even 538’s has been pretty steady, with the average ranging from a Trump lead of about two points to a Biden lead of less than one point.
Why such stability? In part because the 2024 race is a rematch from 2020. In a normal presidential year, there’s some element of voters learning about the candidates, whether it’s how Joe Biden differed from his boss while serving as his vice president (2020) or Donald Trump emerging on the political scene (2016) or people hearing the names Mitt Romney (2012) or Barack Obama (2008) for the first time.
On the specific question of Biden’s fitness for the presidency, the central question elevated by his debate performance, it’s also true that this is already to some extent baked into his support. In a New York Times-Siena College poll released shortly before the debate, nearly half of Democrats said they thought Biden was too old to serve effectively as president. In CBS News-YouGov polling released over the weekend — and conducted after the debate — 46 percent of Democrats said he shouldn’t be running for president. But in February, 36 percent said that. Democrats overwhelmingly supported him for president anyway.
3. Biden’s position is unusually well-sheltered.
That’s largely because he’s running against Trump.
In a story from The Post’s Michael Scherer on Monday, an unnamed pollster for the Biden campaign dismisses questions about Biden’s fitness as potentially not being “a metric that voters are going to use to decide their choice.” It seems like a cynical and self-serving observation, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
The 2016 election — which continues to seem like the best recent point of comparison for 2024 — shows us why that’s the case.
That race offered the country something relatively unusual: two major-party candidates viewed negatively by most Americans. Republicans loathed Hillary Clinton; Democrats were appalled at Donald Trump’s candidacy.
It seemed likely that Clinton would win. After all, exit polling showed that 61 percent of voters viewed Trump as unqualified for the presidency. A majority of voters viewed Clinton as qualified.
But a fifth of those who viewed Trump as unqualified voted for him anyway. Why? Because he wasn’t Clinton. One in 10 voters who voted in 2016 thought Trump was unqualified to be president and voted for Trump to be president. One in 8 voted for Trump centrally because they disliked Clinton. About a fifth of all voters viewed both Trump and Clinton unfavorably; Trump won those voters by 17 points, according to exit polls.
The parallel to 2024 should be obvious: Maybe Democrats (and Americans generally) think Biden shouldn’t be running and believe he can’t serve effectively. But he isn’t Trump, just as Trump wasn’t Clinton.
It works the other way, too. That same Times-Siena poll found that 1 in 6 Trump supporters — likely voters who say they plan to vote for him in November — think he committed a serious federal crime. But hey! At least he’s not Joe Biden.
4. Polling on non-Biden candidates is even shakier.
All of that said, the effects of the debate remain uncertain. The first debate in past presidential cycles has shifted poll numbers, albeit modestly. And 2024 — like 2016 and 2020 — is shaping up to be a contest decided by fewer than 100,000 voters across a handful of states. If Biden sheds support from even a small portion of his base, his chances of reelection are at unusual risk.
But those suggesting that other candidates would necessarily perform better don’t have much evidence to base that on. After all, this whole article has been about evaluating the possible effects on the well-established Trump-Biden contest, with an acknowledgment that those effects are hard to predict. Drawing assumptions about a contest between Trump and, say, Vice President Harris is trickier, since we don’t know how voters would react to having her at the top of the ticket. Throw in other random, relatively unknown names and assessments are even less reliable. If, for example, you feel very confident that you know that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) would do better than Biden, you are operating on feelings, not data.
There’s one other point worth making here: Questions about Biden’s electoral performance are distinct from questions about his fitness for office. Saying that there’s little evidence that Biden would do significantly worse than other Democrats in a contest against Donald Trump (which is true) is not saying that there’s no evidence that such a campaign or a second term in office wouldn’t be more fraught.
Instead, it’s saying that what polling can tell us is limited and slower in arriving than we would often like. Leaving us subject to the whims and vagaries of people who insist they know what would happen, even when they obviously can’t.
Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.