That was Biden at a rally in North Carolina today. He was the guy we usually see. I don’t know who that guy last night was.
CNN has a snap poll about the debate. Make of it what you will:
Registered voters who watched CNN’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely think Trump outperformed Biden, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, with most saying they have no real confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the country.
At the same time, a majority who tuned in say it had little or no effect on their choice for president.
okay…
Debate watchers say, 67% to 33%, that Trump turned in a better performance Thursday. Prior to the debate, the same voters said, 55% to 45%, that they expected Trump to turn in a better performance than Biden. And in 2020, Biden was seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump in both of their presidential debates.
Republicans who watched the first 2024 debate expressed broad confidence in Trump’s performance, the poll finds, with Democrats less sanguine about their party’s presumptive nominee. A near-universal 96% of GOP debate watchers say Trump did the better job in the debate, while a more modest 69% of Democratic debate watchers view Biden as the night’s winner.
[…]
An 81% majority of registered voters who watched the debate say it had no effect on their choice for president, with another 14% saying that it made them reconsider but didn’t change their mind. Just 5% say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.
Roughly equal shares of Biden and Trump supporters – about 3% of each – say the debate had changed their mind. Larger shares of those supporting other candidates say that the debate had changed their minds. Among debate watchers who said pre-debate that they hadn’t chosen a candidate or were open to changing their minds, 9% said that the debate had changed their minds, and 25% were reconsidering.
Just 3% of debate watchers who said in the pre-debate survey that they supported Trump currently say they’d consider voting for Biden, while 5% of Biden supporters currently say they’d consider a vote for Trump.
Among debate watchers overall, 48% say they’d only consider voting for Trump, 40% that they’d only consider voting for Biden, 2% that they’re considering both candidates, and 11% that they aren’t considering voting for either.
The question of whether or not they have any confidence in either candidate to lead the country, the numbers were unchanged by the debate. (More have confidence in Trump than Biden.) None of this is good, that’s for sure. In a close election even a small share of people deciding to go for Trump will make the difference, as we saw in 2016. But it may not be the knock out punch many seem to think it is.
Also keep this in mind:
The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public – in their demographics, their political preferences or the level of attention they pay to politics. Debate watchers in the poll were 5 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that was slightly more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.
The missed opportunity for Biden to really stick it to Trump can’t be overstated. It’s a huge miss. And Biden will be dogged by this forever. People haven’t fully absorbed the hysterical garment rending of the Democratic establishment yet so in a few days they may come to believe that this was an unrecoverable error after all. But so much of this race is baked in that even a devastating performance by either candidate may not move the dial all that much, at least not yet. Stay tuned.
Update: This just dropped too