Reaction Podcast: A Rough Debate For Biden
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Hello and welcome to this late night post-debate edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and the first presidential debate between former President Trump and current President Biden just concluded. As you all know at this point, it is the earliest presidential debate in history.

And this is one of those weird times for us here at FiveThirtyEight where there's not a lot of data to discuss because all of the pollsters who are going to try to gauge how Americans feel about what we just saw are just getting their polls out in the field now. And so it's going to take a little bit, even here at FiveThirtyEight, we partner with

Ipsos and asked the same sample of voters before and after how they experienced the debate. Even that will still take about a day or so, maybe a little less before we get the results there. I've been tracking some stuff on Google Trends and Predicted and so on to try to get the best quantitative in the moment sense of how people feel. Because at the end of the day, dear listeners,

I don't want to shade your opinion of anything that just happened with my own biases. But of course, we are still going to talk about it. And here with me to take on this big challenge of being quantitative in a data-free environment is polling editor at The New York Times, Ruth Agelnik. Welcome to the podcast, Ruth. It's so good to have you. Thanks for having me. And also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Howdy, Galen.

Okay, first question. We'll just keep it really basic. Who won the debate, Trump or Biden, Ruth?

You know, if winning the debate is about beating expectations, I think that Trump beat expectations. I think there were expectations that he was going to fight with the moderators, fight with Biden. He didn't really do that. On the other hand, expectations for Biden around his age and ability to sort of communicate clearly, he didn't meet a lot of those expectations. So I think if that's how you think about who won the debate, that would be my take.

I mean, I think the expectations were pretty low for Biden to begin with. So in the poll that we conducted with Ipsos, we asked people to grade how they thought each candidate would perform on a scale from one to five, basically. And Trump's score was like right average. It was three out of five. Biden's was a two point six out of five, which was like a bit below average. So

but I think significantly worse than Trump. And I think then we also ask questions about each candidate's physical fitness, mental fitness, emotional fitness. Biden scored pretty poorly on the physical and mental fitness part of it. So it wasn't hard to put together a story of expectations are low for Biden because of his advanced age. Obviously, Republicans have depicted him as kind of like a doddering old fool. And there have been concerns even within the Democratic Party about that and certainly in the media as well. And I think, frankly,

this debate will inflame those. Obviously, with the caveat that we are going to get data tomorrow. So as you mentioned, Galen, our poll with Ipsos is going back into the field basically as I speak, and we will have data about who actual voters thought did better in the debate. But as a subjective pundit, I agree with Ruth, I think,

Trump was the clear winner of this debate. Biden was not good. And people will dismiss this as theater chrism, but debates are theater, people. And his delivery was just really, really rough. His campaign claimed that he had cold. He was raspy. He was unintelligible at times. He kept stumbling over words. He really petered out on a couple of those answers. Trump was, in contrast, he was

fairly restrained for being Donald Trump. He was extremely disciplined. We'll talk about this, but he kept on bringing it back to topics that were advantageous for him. He kind of made jabs at Biden's age and unintelligibility, but didn't like run amok with it in a way that

might be seen as overdoing it or gloating. I will be surprised if Americans don't think that Trump did better in the debate. The question, of course, is whether it matters given how dug in voters are, given that I suspect the ratings for this debate in the middle of the summer will be quite low. So TBD on that. Those are some good themes, Nathaniel, that you brought up. And I want to try to add some data to them as I've been thinking about this. One is that

We know, looking at polling thus far, that when you ask Americans questions about like, who do you think is a good person or who do you think is a good guy? They tend to think that Biden is more of a good guy. But when it comes to questions about who you think is strong or competent, they tend to think that Trump is more strong and competent. I think that

this may have enforced those perceptions. I mean, even if you thought that Joe Biden is a good guy or a nice guy or whatever, I mean, he did not seem in command or the leader or the strong person on the stage. And in fact, a couple of things that were happening during the debate, I tracked both Google searches for Trump and Biden. They were roughly even. They were

certain points where somebody ticked up or somebody ticked down. Then I also looked at, you know, Donald Trump age, Joe Biden age and Donald Trump old and Joe Biden or

old. And throughout the entire debate, you see that there are significantly more searches, maybe twice as many, if not more, for Joe Biden in those two categories for old and age. When it comes to the discipline section of what you're talking about, we see that on the issues of

Donald Trump was much more sort of, I guess, adept at making the conversation about the border. In the first hour of the debate, the conversation was largely about the border, inflation, January 6th, Ukraine and Israel. And

And the order of how much Google search interest spiked up at the times was far and away the border was the most searched, then inflation, then Ukraine, then January 6th, then Israel. And so if part of this is a contest to be on solid footing and be talking about things that are advantageous to you, quantitatively,

Trump did that. Ruth, between Nathaniel's pundit theater criticism and some of my Google Trends data, what do you think about it all?

Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of thinking about two things as you were talking. One is we have this question that we've asked over and over about sort of personality and temperament, because this has been a concern for people with Trump. And we've seen the gap. It used to be that people rated Biden more highly on personality and temperament than Trump. There was this big gap between the two of them. It's been closing. It was closing before the debate. We did a pre-debate poll and we saw that that was the closest they've ever been. It was about two percentage points apart. And in this

debate, Trump sort of made the case that he has the personality and temperament. He wasn't exhibiting those concerns people had. So I wouldn't be shocked if that number increased for Trump, that he had the personality and temperament and decreased or at least remained the same for Biden. And in terms of the issues you were talking about, I mean,

there's no question that that's exactly the game that Trump was playing. He was trying to sort of control which issues were being talked about. And in our polling, he was hitting the issues that he does better on. He was hitting the economy. He was hitting immigration. He was hitting foreign policy. These are consistently issues across the last several months where we've seen voters give the advantage to Trump. And so as long as he keeps the conversation there, which he was successfully steering it back to, that's good news for him.

So before we go any further here, let's touch the third rail for a second, because why not? In the first roughly 30 minutes of the debate,

Joe Biden's chance of being the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee dropped by about 20 percentage points on Predict It. And Gavin Newsom rose. This is the Democratic nominee. Right, right, right. So the thing- Not to win the general election. The thing that Democrats have already voted for. The thing that he has already clinched. Joe Biden being the nominee and the thing that he's already clinched, the numerical threshold that he's already surpassed.

It went from Joe Biden with about an 86% chance of being the Democratic nominee to about a 66% chance of being the Democratic nominee. As we speak right now, whoa. Okay.

okay, it's dropped even further. It went back up later in the debate. It's now at 60%. So it's dropped 25 percentage points over the course of the debate. Gavin Newsom's likelihood is up 17 percentage points. Kamala Harris's is up 11 percentage points to 25% chance and 16% chance accordingly. Now, lots of caveats here. These are the online betting odds that

We have no idea the people who are behind them and maybe total nonsense. But dear listener, I am using this as a way to couch what is ultimately an uncomfortable question for the Democratic Party at this point, which is after observing what they just did, will there be a movement to replace Joe Biden on the ticket?

Now, I can tell you, we did actually ask this exact question right before the debate. We asked whether Biden should be the nominee or there should be a different nominee, whether Trump should be the nominee or there should be a different nominee. And I don't think I'm revealing anything to say. We will ask that question again after the debate. And even before the debate, and I think this will probably move the needle even more, even before the debate, the Democratic Party was divided on this question. They were divided on whether or not

Biden should remain the nominee, which is wild at this stage in the race. And the Republican Party was really solidified around Trump. And just to put some numbers around it, Republicans, 80 percent of Republicans said that they thought that Trump should remain the nominee. 17 percent said there should be another nominee. By contrast, on the Democratic side,

52% said Joe Biden should remain the nominee. 45% said there should be another nominee. Now, we're obviously going to check in on that again. And for people who are watching Twitter while this is happening, you saw high profile Democrats or people talking about getting texts from high profile Democrats.

saying they're rethinking if he should be the nominee. Nicholas Kristof tweeting that he should be replaced as the nominee. So this is certainly a conversation that's happening, not just on Predict It, because color be skeptical of Predict It in general, but this is a conversation and I'll be interested to watch how the data changes. Wow. Little love for the Scottish teens from Ruth on this podcast.

Nathaniel, you have long been strongly in the camp of Joe Biden is the nominee and any talk otherwise is malarkey, to quote a president. Have you shifted at all?

I mean, no, ultimately, I don't think he's going to be, you know, like step aside or anything like that. That would be without exaggeration, like one of the most extraordinary things that has happened in politics, certainly in my lifetime, if not ever. The party would need to turn against him in a way that is so coordinated that I don't think a party is really capable of doing unless Biden himself decides to step aside voluntarily and kind of engineers it from the top down.

I think that this performance seemed bad enough. And again, I think we probably need to wait for the numbers and the actual fallout. But it seems to me like it is going to be the test of that theory, right, as to whether this is even possible. If it is, it seems like this would be the moment he had what appears to be a very bad performance related to his age. And if

If he does fall in the polls as a result of this, which, again, is a still an if at this point, that is, I think, the moment when Democrats, if they are going to push that panic button, would push that panic button. So in a sense, it's a very interesting political science experiment as to whether this could possibly happen. I remain skeptical, but I will watch to see what happens. Wow. This is this is the most open minded experiment.

by a long shot, I've ever heard you be about this possibility. Yeah. I mean, this is a moment that calls for that, I think. I think for some people, there was some hypothesizing that this debate happened today because of exactly this possibility that the Democratic Party, the Biden administration, you know, the campaign didn't want to wait for something like this to happen until, you know, the third week of September.

Is that why this happened now? Why are we actually doing all of this right now? To quote another famous debate moment, who am I and why am I here? I mean, no, again, I think that that would require a level of like.

three-dimensional chess thinking that politicians and parties are not capable of doing. But it does create that opportunity, even though it really, again, would be an extraordinary and chaotic thing if it happened. But because Biden has not been nominated at the convention yet, there is theoretically this chance. Again, I think...

It's quite unlikely because, again, like you would need all these people like governors, not just Nicholas Kristof, to stand up and say the president of my party is too old to lead. He needs to step aside, which is basically walking the plank for you personally. You would need strength in numbers. Everybody would need to do that at the same time or else your political career is over. Those are the stakes. But maybe some people will think the stakes are high enough.

But that's why it's still probably the likeliest scenario that Joe Biden makes the decision himself. Yeah, but I think equally as important and I am just as skeptical as Nathaniel that this will actually happen. I very much agree with you on that. The other thing that's missing, though, is a consensus alternative. I don't think that there's a consensus alternative in the Democratic Party. And so without that, it feels even less likely like there's not somebody that everybody would turn to. And nobody wants a messy fight with everybody putting their hand in the pot. I mean, Democrats, I think

would recognize that that would be a challenge. Yeah, Ruth, you've done polling at The New York Times about the popularity of Kamala Harris and how she would potentially do in a matchup against Donald Trump. I can't remember if you've done polling about any other high-profile Democrats, but what is the verdict there if the argument is strictly about electability?

I mean, she didn't do that much better than Joe Biden. There were we found some small percentage of voters that were sort of these Kamala, not Joe, but it wasn't enough to put her over the edge against Trump. And so what we found in our polling was that she wasn't that much more competitive than Biden. At the same time, though, again, I think politically,

If Biden is replaced, it has to be Harris because nobody wants a messy fight because she is the vice president, because she is a black woman. And the optics of passing over a black woman would be really bad for the Democrats, a party that whose base is black voters and women are two important parts of their base. I just think that would have to happen. And the fact that a lot of Democrats aren't sold on Kamala Harris is another thing that is perhaps a

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So let's go back to the data for a second here with the help of our dutiful listeners.

Producer slash intern Cameron Chertavian and Jayla Everett, we counted mentions of all of the different things that came up in the debate. And folks will be unsurprised to hear that of the things that we considered, and there was about two dozen maybe words that we considered, the most mentioned was the border, 32 mentions. But actually, the second most mentioned was

word was taxes with 28 mentions, almost as many as the border. Inflation, on the other hand, had 12 mentions, the same as China. The economy had 13 mentions. So in that general vicinity. And then on the topic of, oh, also Russia had 12. And then when it comes to like criminal had five mentions and convicted had nine mentions. So add that up to be roughly in that ballpark.

But the thing that really does stick out to me here is taxes. And is that sort of a way of talking about the economy that people understand really viscerally? Do we see in polling that people are very concerned about tax rates, Ruth? What was that part of the debate about?

Yeah, I will say that that was certainly surprising to me because when we ask about people's most important issue, the most important issue to their vote, we do it as an open end. So we let people just tell us in their own words. And certainly some people say taxes, but far fewer than say inflation or the economy. Those are the words that keep coming up over and over. So I was a little surprised, particularly when

Biden was given the chance to give his closing statement that he started off with taxes. Because I think not just our polling, but private polling, public polling all shows that inflation really is the key issue for these voters that he's trying to win over. So that was surprising to me.

Yeah, I think every debate sometimes has like a weird curveball that it throws. They're like, oh, like that topic came up in a way that I wasn't expecting and that taxes were kind of that this time around. Part of it might be that like that's one of the rare issues that maybe both sides wanted to talk about. For Biden, taxes are a

way to talk about the economy, which we know is Americans most important issue in a way that is kind of more advantageous to him, certainly than inflation, because he as we saw, he talked about kind of the fairness of taxes and like taxing the rich and stuff more. And those concepts are popular.

At the same time, Trump had his tax cuts that he was like one of the big accomplishments of his presidency. He defended them as stimulating the greatest economy that the world has ever seen. This was also, I believe, the second question that the moderators asked. So they kind of like primed it as well. It also strikes me as an area that the campaign has indicated, right?

at least through the emails that I get to my inbox and stories and so on, that they're trying to create this dynamic or repeat the dynamic of 2012, where you have a more sort of, on the Democratic side, a more sort of populist fighting for the working class,

type candidate. And then on the Republican side, you have somebody who's just very interested in cutting taxes for the wealthy. And this is like a live issue because whoever is president, you know, from 2025 to 2029 is going to have to contend with whether to keep the corporate tax rate at the 21 percent that it was lowered to under Trump, along with other tax cuts that are set to expire in a second term for either of them. But again,

As we mentioned with the border already, that part of the challenge of not being the more dominant force on the stage is that you can't steer the conversation necessarily in that direction and keep putting it to your opponent again and again and again to say, you know, you favor the rich over the poor or whatever dynamic you want to create.

I should also say here that an important dynamic on the stage tonight was that there were only two candidates instead of three because RFK Jr. didn't qualify for the debate. We had discussed previously on this podcast that this may be a focusing event that emphasizes that this is a race between Trump and Biden and, you know, RFK Jr. isn't a viable alternative and that we might potentially see his support fall in the polls after this debate.

Do we still think that now? What does RFK Jr.'s future look like? You know, it's interesting. I mean, we don't have data yet on this. I think we'll all be collecting data in the next few days to answer this question. But

Some people were doing live focus groups with undecided voters. This is like a common thing that campaigns do. And from what I saw on Twitter, a lot of the reaction was frustration with both sides, right? Like it's not that people thought that Trump did a great job. A lot of these undecided voters said that they were frustrated with both candidates. And so it does make you wonder if it will keep RFK's chances alive because people who already weren't thrilled with the options looked at this and said, well, I still really don't like these options. So

You know, it's hard to say, and this is kind of just a guess without data, but it does feel like it wouldn't necessarily have killed his campaign in the way that if either of them had done a tremendous job in the debate, it might have. Well, because also, let's be real here. Like,

Important moments from the debate. Donald Trump was once again super muddled on whether or not he's going to accept the results of this upcoming election. Now, because Democrats are not fielding a candidate who ensures that Donald Trump has to sort of answer to difficult questions about his record, his election.

attitude towards democracy, and so on and so forth. That's not what the conversation is about tonight. You know, listeners may be upset about that, that we're not focusing more on the norm breaking, unpresidential behavior of the former president, but

But the reality is, is it's also incumbent on Democrats to field somebody in a competitive election that ensures that that's what the conversation is about. And they haven't done that. Well, and can I just add part of our role as pollsters or my role as a pollster is we collect the opinions of Americans and then we share the voices of Americans.

And for better or worse, this is what Americans are talking about. And Americans aren't as concerned right now about the threats to democracy, about concerns about Trump not accepting the results of the election. Like, I think there are a lot of people, including a lot of listeners to this podcast, a lot of people in America who are very concerned about that. But when you look at the opinions of Americans across the political spectrum, on the whole, they're just not as concerned about that right now. And you can say that that's

not a good thing. You can have views about that. But our role is to share the views of Americans. And this is what Americans think right now. Yeah. And I actually think that the moderators deserve some credit. I thought their questions overall were well thought out, well balanced. And I think that their questions on like January 6th, they asked about like political violence of Trump were good and pointed. And I do think that, yeah, it is worth noting that he did not say that he would

accept the results of the election. I don't think that's shocking to anyone. But I think it was good that the moderators pressed him on that. I don't think his answer on that was very good on kind of the substance of it. But again, he answered in a way that was energetic and intelligible, which was a contrast to Biden's answers on some of the

issues that he is perceived as weak on. And again, Trump kept on bringing things back to topics that were strong for him. So one of the things I was most struck by was Trump's initial answer to the January 6th question, which was like, on January 6th, 2021, the economy was strong and like we didn't have a border crisis and stuff like that. And he just

Pivot, pivot, pivot. And like that's the kind of stuff that like traditional politicians do and that, you know, you would have seen in like a 2012 debate. I think that that was really telling. And you could tell that he was kind of like on the defensive on a couple of topics. I think abortion was another one. So he didn't exactly cover himself in glory by saying that Biden had a bad performance. That doesn't mean that Trump had a good one, but he he kind of knew how to wriggle out of that situation.

Yeah. And I will say it's worth noting on January 6th on Charlottesville, these were some of Biden's best moments of the debate where he really was able to hit back hard against Trump. He was really animated. He had really good, strong responses there. Yeah, he seemed at his best when he was really riled up and angry. Right. Like the other times when he was very much on the back foot were obviously his weak points and he spent most of the debate on the back foot.

The problem, though, of course, is that once an audience becomes trained on your delivery or your well-being, because again, I also searched Google Trends for Joe Biden voice and Joe Biden voice spiked, as you might imagine. And of course, the campaign said that he has a cold during the commercial break information that they didn't share before the debate. But once you're trained on that and once you start paying attention to the presentation, you're going to be able to

That's the risk, that that's ultimately what the audience gets out of the experience, as opposed to thinking, well, what is Trump's position on abortion? Because I don't know after that debate what Trump's position on abortion is. For example, one of the hot there were, you know, it's a hot take economy out there. We try to bring the data, but we can only do so well, like I said at the start. But one of the hot takes I read was odds of a September 10th debate are close to zero about now.

from Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report. Of course, ABC, our home, our company, would be hosting that debate. So I hope it happens. For many reasons, you know, we talked about the likelihood of replacing Biden. Everyone's very skeptical. What about the likelihood of a second debate?

I think Amy is right. And to be fair, she's not one for the super hot takes. I think that's a tepid take. We asked before the debate about concerns about Biden's age, and we had almost 45 percent of voters, half of undecided voters, not just saying that they thought he was too old, but we asked this sort of second question.

stage, his age is such a problem that he's literally not capable of handling the job. It's hard to feel like that number is not going to go up. And if that number goes up, you can see the chances of a second debate going down. All right. Well, it is getting late. Any final thoughts before I let you go this evening? I guess my final thought is just

I really want to see what the data says. We have done a fair amount of speculation here and the proof will be in the pudding. It is, again, very possible that not a lot of people watch the debate. Not a lot of people are going to pay attention because it is the middle of summer. People are on vacation and this won't

matter to the actual horse race. If the polls don't move, people are going to forget about this in a week. If the polls move, then we might have that full blown Democratic panic. Well, and I'll just add, I'm not just paying attention to whether the polls move in the next days. I really am thinking about the next week because a lot of people are consuming the debate with clips afterwards. And so I think people won't just be polling immediately afterwards, but the days and week afterwards are really going to tell me there's kind of a

It takes a while to set, and it'll be interesting to see after this is set how people react. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for this evening. Thank you, Ruth and Nathaniel. Thanks, Galen.

Thanks. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chortavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.