President Joe Biden followed former President Donald Trump — albeit within the margin of error — in many national polls and battleground states ahead of the Biden debate.
Now Biden is trailing by 1 to 2 points more in some surveys, but the movement is still within the margin of error, and some of the results reflect a radically changed race – even in polarized politics and tight divisions, the campaign can be good. hinge on that margin.
The poll comes 11 days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance as some Democrats called for him to drop out of the race and a defiant Biden insisted he was staying in the campaign. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
And the minimal change in the poll mirrors what the survey found after Trump’s criminal conviction at the end of May – a little movement of the sort that can be a matter of much in the close presidential campaign but nothing suggesting the basic race has changed compared to what happened before.
Take a national poll. Before the debate, Trump was ahead of Biden by 1 point among likely voters in a CBS News/YouGov poll. Now the lead is 2 points – within the margin of error.
In a CNN national poll before the debate, in April, Trump was up 6 points. After the debate? It is identical to 6 points.
The biggest movement came from a national New York Times/Siena College poll, but that movement did not suggest a sea change in the race in two weeks. Before the debate, according to the survey, Trump was ahead of Biden by 6 points among registered voters and 4 points among likely voters.
After the debate, Trump’s lead was 8 points among registered voters and 6 points among likely voters. This is a 2 point change in Trump’s direction.
Opinion polls on the battlefield also show stability
Then there are the battleground-state polls. A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released over the weekend found the race mostly stable, with Trump slightly ahead in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and with Biden in Michigan and Wisconsin. All results are within the margin of error, except for Trump’s 7-point lead in Pennsylvania.
(That being said, it’s hard to reconcile Biden being down 7 points in Pennsylvania but ahead by 5 points in the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll.)
The exception to the stable polling was the Saint Anselm College poll in New Hampshire, which found Trump ahead, albeit within the margin of error, in a multi-candidate field there. Remember, Democrats have won New Hampshire in every presidential election since 2000.
When the topline result does not paint a picture of the basic race is changed, why already changed rapidly in the polls as the debate over perceptions of Biden’s health.
The CBS/YouGov poll found the share of voters who believe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to be president fell from 35% in June to 27% after the debate — a bigger shift than found in CBS polls in the horse race.
Important questions to ask
National Democrats panicked after Biden’s debate performance and its aftermath — with good reason.
But the polls raise an important question: Why didn’t they panic before the debate, when the numbers already showed Biden facing a tough road to re-election? Are national Democrats and progressive media voices simply following where most voters go before their age and health?
Are most voters locked into their perceptions of Biden and Trump, which explains why seismic events — like Trump’s credibility or Biden’s debate performance — barely budge the poll numbers?
And could another seismic event move the race a few points in the other direction for unlocked voters?
After all, at least four events so far have slightly moved the numbers in this stable race over the past year – the Israel-Hamas war, the aftermath of Biden’s State of the Union speech, Trump’s conviction and the June 27 debate.
Will there be more? You can probably count on it.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com