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Joe Biden is in damage control mode.
The president’s stunningly poor debate performance has sparked a full-on meltdown across the Democratic Party. Donors are fretting. The editorial boards of the nation’s largest newspapers are urging Biden to exit the race, as are influential columnists. And Democrats running down the ticket are scrambling to separate themselves from their struggling standard-bearer.
But there are still ways in which Biden and his allies can stop his bad night from turning into curtains for his political career. Here are some of the key things to watch to see whether he can pull it off:
You’ll want to watch the polls. But know this: They might actually overstate Biden’s nosedive
The polls aren’t likely to look pretty for the president over the next few days.
But those surveys are also likely to overstate the magnitude of his decline — just as they oversold his lead after his first debate against Donald Trump four years ago.
After Biden’s first showdown with Trump in 2020 — regarded as a trainwreck in which the then-president was seen as belligerent — polls showed Biden ahead by double digits. That was an artificial sugar high for the Democrat, and there’s a simple explanation why: Republicans didn’t want to respond to polls when the news was bad for their candidate.
Polls rely on representative samples of voters who are willing to be interviewed. And pollsters work hard to adjust for shortcomings in their respondent pools, such as imbalances in gender, race, or educational attainment.
But after an event like last week’s debate, the electorate can simply be hard to accurately poll if a key set of voters — in this case, shell-shocked Democrats — are unwilling to talk about how they’re feeling.
Even if pollsters take the extra step of adding political attitudes to those weighting variables — like voters’ partisan identification or registration or their recalled 2020 vote choice — they still risk missing some voters who are tuning out politics and surveys in a low moment for their candidate.
Biden’s campaign is already making this argument. In a memo to reporters on Saturday, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon cited the example then-President Barack Obama’s poor performance in the first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012.
“If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” she wrote. “In 2012, we saw media coverage of President Obama’s first debate performance drive a large, but temporary, drop in his polling – driven almost entirely by fewer Democrats answering polls in the days after the debate, rather than true changes in support.”
Will Biden start embracing the press to reach the kind of audience that watched him Thursday?
Over 51 million people watched Biden stumble and bumble for 90 minutes straight on national television. That will be hard to undo.
Only a small fraction of that number watched his campaign’s livestream of a rally the next day in which he tried to reframe his performance — and quell widespread Democratic panic over it.
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” a reinvigorated, though still coughing, Biden said to a cheering crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina. “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 I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth.”
Several news networks carried his remarks live, and clips of the speech that his campaign shared online racked up millions of views within minutes.
But while the viral videos give Biden’s online backers something to brandish in the face of Republicans’ attacks and Democrats’ hand-wringing, they may not be reaching the same, largely older audience that watched the debate — and who may now be tuning out of the presidential race just as quickly as they tuned in.
When other politicians have faced crises, they’ve sought to get huge audiences by going on lengthy tours — appearing on daytime and late-night talk shows, sitting for lengthy interviews and upping their interactions with the press.
Biden has long avoided that kind of politicking. But the moment — and anxious Democrats — may demand it of him.
How do down-ballot Democrats respond?
Biden isn’t the only Democrat who could face consequences for his debate-stage struggles — and uproar from down-ballot candidates who have to run under his name is one of the few things that could prompt changes at the top of the ticket.
The president’s poor showing is already complicating down-ballot Democrats’ efforts to run separately from the unpopular incumbent, with Republicans seizing on Biden’s abysmal performance to try and tie vulnerable incumbents to him.
Purple-district Democrats publicly limited their criticism to the president’s debate performance. “It was a terrible debate,” said Rep. Angie Craig, who represents a swing district in southern Minnesota. “Joe Biden couldn’t communicate, and Donald Trump lied every time he opened his mouth.”
But privately they fretted about the down-ballot repercussions. Democrats have already been struggling to reconcile why positive signs for the party down the ballot — candidates over-performing in special elections, Senate incumbents running comfortably ahead of their Republican rivals in swing states — are failing to translate to enthusiasm for the man at the top of the ticket. Now they fear Biden’s blunders could trickle down — and are looking for ways to stop that from happening.
“Frontline members are concerned,” Symone Sanders Townsend, a former senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, said post-debate on MSNBC. “Some of them want to weigh in on the [Biden campaign’s] messaging.”
Will third-party and independent candidates start gaining momentum?
Democrats were already worried about third-party candidates siphoning votes from Biden. Now they’re fretting that his disastrous showing on Thursday could actively drive voters in another direction.
Many of those voters might not be willing to go as far as to vote for Trump. But they might stay home — or go outside the two-party system.
Seeing Biden’s numbers drop in post-debate flash polls gave Joe Amoroso, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s field director, hope that the long shot presidential campaign can expand its coalition.
“I imagine those numbers will be coming over to us in many ways. You have a lot of never-Trumpers and such,” Amoroso told POLITICO.
But Kennedy’s debate counter-programming, which started with a rant against a rigged system and ended with his typical pitch against government power, was clearly not aimed at winning over swing voters. And some Democratic strategists believe increased exposure for Kennedy could backfire on the controversial independent candidate.
“A general trend that we’ve been seeing across the board is that when voters are curious about third party candidates, once they learn about RFK’s deeply unpopular and extreme agenda, they realize he’s not a safe place to park your vote,” said Britt Jacovich, a spokesperson for MoveOn, a progressive organization supporting Biden.
Trump has his own troubles ahead. Will the attention shift back to him?
Biden’s debate-stage struggles may have a short shelf life. And the president would have his predecessor to thank for it.
The Supreme Court on Monday is poised to issue a blockbuster decision on whether Trump can claim immunity from criminal prosecution over his attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Just over a week later, Trump is set to return to Manhattan to learn his sentence for being convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records. And the presumptive GOP nominee is due to announce his running mate any day now, either ahead of or during the Republican National Convention that begins on July 15.
Any of those events could reshape the contours of the presidential race. And at the very least they’ll provide jittery Democrats a distraction — and pundits something else to talk about.
Those events can also reverberate beyond a temporary news cycle, depending on how both sides respond to it. And Trump’s volatility means that at any moment he can say or do something that could bring the attention back to him — and away from Biden’s debate performance and age.
Nicholas Wu and Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.
