Three new major national polls out Sunday morning bolstered President Joe Biden’s argument to remain the Democratic Party’s nominee this fall after his poor debate performance last month — while also underscoring the structural challenges his campaign has faced for months.
The polls, from CBS News, Fox News and NBC News, were conducted before the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump Saturday in Western Pennsylvania. But they still could play a role in the discussion of whether Biden should still be the Democratic nominee in November.
The good news in the data for Biden: His numbers have not slipped markedly in any of the three surveys since the late June debate. The political freefall that some Democrats feared following the June 27 debate is not apparent in the data.
But that simple fact also obscures the fact that Biden, on balance, consistently trails Trump by a slight margin following the debate and ahead of this week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee.
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The Fox News poll showed Trump only 1 point ahead of Biden in a national, head-to-head race, 49 percent to 48 percent. Biden led by 2 points in the previous poll, in mid June, but the shift is well within the poll’s margin of error.
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In the NBC News poll, Trump led Biden, 45 percent to 43 percent. The presumptive Republican nominee also held a 2-point lead in NBC’s last survey in April.
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The CBS News poll, which surveyed voters in the seven key Electoral College battleground states, shows Trump leading, 50 percent to 48 percent. That’s similar to a week ago, when Trump led, 51 percent to 48 percent.
The Biden campaign and its allies have been trying to convince fellow Democrats he should remain as the party’s nominee, pointing to public and private polling data to show only modest shifts over the past two weeks. But it hasn’t been entirely effective: Nearly two dozen congressional Democrats have publicly called on him to decline the nomination and allow another candidate to step forward.
And even if voters aren’t turning on Biden in droves after the debate, there are multiple warning signs in the data. Not only is Biden generally slightly behind nationally and in battleground states, but more voters now say they are concerned about Biden’s age: 79 percent of voters in the NBC News poll said they have major or moderate concerns that, at 81, Biden may not have “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.” Just 50 percent said the same about Trump at 78-years-old.
It’s far too early to know whether the shooting at Trump’s event this weekend or the coming week’s Republican convention will lead to more significant changes in the electorate, but the remarkable stability of the race following the debate suggests that’s unlikely.
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