Meaning matters
People on the edges of my corner of the internet are trumpeting this poll at the moment, from the Civics and Health Institutions Project, citing no change in voter preference following the debate, and while I have no plan to do a deep dive on this given that it’s not my area, I would like to make a couple of comments.
The key takeaway from the data seems to be that the debate had no effect on voter preference (I’ll get to that word momentarily): “What the report finds is that Biden held on to 94% of the people who said they would support him before the debate. For Trump, 86% of people who said they would support him before the debate said they would do so after the debate.” The conclusion some are drawing is that the problems have been wildly blown out of proportion by media elites.
I find the latter part of that to be a preposterous conclusion regardless: these same organizations have largely been steadfastly behind Biden this whole time, and generally speaking, Biden serves there interests — to make the claim that this is an elitist concern that most people don’t care about is illogical. It may be that most people don’t care, but most people don’t care about most political issues.
Which leads to the larger issue I have: given how polarized the political climate in this country is, it isn’t really all that surprising that people who were still going to vote for Biden just before the debate still plan to vote for him just after the debate. Biden was already being heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, most notably his handling of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and many of the people who were still planning to vote for him pre-debate had already dug their heels in. On the left, we’ve been hearing for months from these types that Biden isn’t perfect but he’s our guy, and it’s our responsibility to vote for him regardless.
As a result, my reading of the poll results is that committed Democratic voters are still planning to vote Dem, and GOP voters are still going to vote GOP, and the debate didn’t change that. But that was never really the concern, and I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding about what, precisely, those who are criticizing Biden are saying.
For some reason, the framing from a lot of die-hard Dem voters treats it as if we’re going to vote for Trump instead. That’s not the case, though. I suspect the vast majority of leftists will vote for Biden if he ends up being the nominee, albeit reluctantly. Many will of course vote third-party, but I’ll bet that most will vote strategically even so — i.e., swing state voters will vote for Biden; voters in safe states may vote third-party or abstain. The argument is that Biden’s recent performance will raise significant questions for independent, centrist, uncertain voters about his ability to run, which will in turn impact his ability to actually win the election. The argument is that he should be replaced with someone who inspires more confidence in their ability not only to beat Trump, but to lead effectively after that.
I wrote above that I was going to come back to the idea of voter preference. I would argue that this doesn’t actually show anything about voter preference, but rather that this particular poll demonstrates that the political climate leads to voter entrenchment. This is echoed by a different poll, from Bendixen and Amandi International, which found that “Of the 86 percent of likely voters who watched all or part of the debate, just 29 percent said Biden has the mental capacity and physical stamina to serve another four-year term, compared with 61 percent who said he does not. Only 33 percent said he should continue as the Democratic nominee, versus 52 percent who believe he should not. And just half of Democrats said Biden should be the party’s nominee or is mentally and physically fit to serve out another term” (Politico). Elsewhere, the survey finds that while Trump is currently leading Biden by a slim majority, Harris (and most hypothetical Harris-led tickets) are leading Trump by a slim majority.
In other words, this is the concern: Is Joe Biden the best-equipped candidate to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election? CHIP50 tells me that nearly everyone who was already planning to vote for Biden (and Trump) pre-debate is still planning to do so; on the other hand, BAI tells me that even if that’s the case, Trump is still currently edging out Biden head-to-head, whereas Biden’s VP edges out Trump instead. I would argue that the former isn’t really relevant, because the diehards aren’t the people you need to win elections — you need to be able to convince the people who aren’t sure, who don’t plan to vote, or who plan to vote third-party, that your candidate is worth their vote.
I’m not going to pretend to have the easy, 100% correct answer here. Swapping candidates this late in the game may certainly backfire in ways we can’t predict. Moreover, we learned in 2016 just how flawed polling can be. (Or more accurately, lots of people learned how statistical probability actually works and stopped believing Nate Silver to be some kind of magical soothsayer.) But, it is important that we have the same conversation, and right now, I really don’t think we are.