President Trump’s quest to win a second term is not in good shape. He entered Tuesday night’s debate with roughly a 7- or 8-point deficit in national polls, putting him further behind at this stage of the race than any other candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.
If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer. After a couple of strong polls for Joe Biden earlier this week in Pennsylvania — the state that’s currently most likely to decide the election — Trump now trails there by 5 to 6 points. He’s down by about 7 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, meanwhile. Those states, along with Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire — where Biden has also polled strongly lately — suggest that Biden is winning back some of the Obama-Trump white working-class voters who flocked to Trump four years ago. Indeed, Biden is as close to winning South Carolina or Alaska as Trump is to winning Michigan and Wisconsin, based on recent polls of those states.
At a time when Trump desperately needed a boost, the debate probably didn’t help him either — it may have hurt him. Every scientific poll we’ve seen had Trump losing the debate, some by narrow margins and some by wide ones.
That includes the poll Genesis Brand conducted with Ipsos, which surveyed the same group of voters before and after the debate. While the poll didn’t show a massive swing — most voters stuck to their initial preferences — more voters did rate Biden’s performance favorably, and Biden gained ground relative to Trump based on the number of voters who said they were certain to vote for him, roughly tantamount to a 3-point swing toward Biden in head-to-head polls.
Now, I’m not predicting this will happen, but if Biden’s national lead were to expand to 9 or 10 points, which is consistent with the sorts of polling bounces we’ve seen in the past for candidates who were perceived to win debates — especially challengers debating an incumbent for the first time — Trump’s situation could become quite desperate.
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