New polling indicates that President Joe Biden’s reelection chances may not have been damaged by his poor presidential debate performance on June 27 as much as many members of his own party originally thought or, in some cases, continue to believe.
In an interview recorded on Tuesday for the NC Newsline radio show/podcast News & Views, veteran pollster Tom Jensen of the Raleigh-based national polling firm Public Policy Polling said that while the immediate impact of his widely panned performance on poll numbers “looked pretty bad for Biden,” the president has since rebounded. This, said Jensen, is a fairly typical and unsurprising development.
This is from the interview:
“Well, a lot of the time with something like Biden’s poor debate performance, you’ll see sort of an immediate impact in the polls, and I think that was reflected in that the first week or so after the debate; there were some polls that looked pretty bad for Biden. But most of the time, episodes like this, the impact of them wears off pretty quickly, and that’s really what we’re seeing as we sort of get back from the Fourth of July holiday and a couple weeks have passed. We’re now seeing a race that looks very similar to where it was before the debate — which is basically a toss-up, nationally.”
Jensen went on to say that, as it has been for some time, Biden’s fate in three closely contested states will likely determine the outcome of the election.
“The most clear path to victory for Joe Biden is winning the midwestern trifecta of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and those states post-debate are all still pretty much exactly 50-50. So, you know, Biden is obviously not in a great position, but I think some people have sort of been moving towards almost declaring the race to be over, and that’s really just not the case. It’s still a 50-50 contest that could really go either way.”
Jensen added that his polling in recent days had uncovered another related and surprising trend:
“We’re actually seeing Democrats more fired up about the election than they’ve been before. It’s almost like there’s a blowback against the blowback about Biden’s job performance and that even if people…do have concerns about how Biden did in the debate or about his fitness generally, they’re getting so annoyed with the focus on that as opposed to the focus on Trump being a felon, that it’s actually sort of increasing their enthusiasm for Biden.”
[You can hear the entire News & Views interview with Tom Jensen — which includes his takes on some key North Carolina races — as well a conversation with Western Carolina University political scientist, Prof. Chris Cooper, this coming weekend on a radio station near you or any of several podcast platforms.]
