President Joe Biden’s decision to take Donald Trump up on his “anytime and anywhere” debate offer and propose June and September debates is a clear sign of worry among his reelection campaign team.
Two months ago, Biden cracked the door open to not having any debates, which hadn’t happened in a presidential race since 1972. Asked by a reporter if he would “commit to a debate with former President Trump,” Biden responded, “It depends on his behavior.”
Nothing has changed about Trump’s behavior since then. What also hasn’t changed is who is leading the polls.
Two weeks ago, I sketched out Biden’s most promising path to garner the 270 Electoral College votes needed to be reelected: Pennsylvania to Michigan, Wisconsin to Nebraska’s Omaha-based 2nd congressional district. Even after the recent set of New York Times swing state polls that looked ominous for Biden, in both the Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight averages, the incumbent is still only behind by a surmountable point or two in the critical Rust Belt swing states.
But behind is behind, and Biden is behind.
Worse, recent polling suggests Biden only has a narrow path to 270. He would need a bigger recovery in the more diverse Sun Belt swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina—where his deficit is generally around 5 or 6 points—to recreate the multiple paths he had four years ago when he narrowly defeated Trump in several critical battlegrounds.
Biden’s poll problem can be looked at in two ways.
One is that early polling is not predictive and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know—namely, that this is a close race necessitating a significant get-out-the-vote effort. In turn, the Biden campaign need not make any panicky course corrections.
The other is that the current polls expose a weakness at the top of the Democratic ticket. Democratic Senate candidates in the battleground states are leading by a bit, running ahead of Biden. House Democrats have even taken a slight lead in the generic congressional ballot. Yet Biden still trails, suggesting there’s something broken that needs fixing.
It might be true that no course corrections are necessary. Simply staying on message for the next six months might be all the 81-year-old president and his campaign need to reach minimal news-consuming swing voters in time for Election Day.
Think back to 2012, when Democrats were panicking about President Barack Obama’s prospects and questioning his ability to communicate economic improvement coming out of the Great Recession. In the CBS/New York Times poll, from 2010 through much of 2012, Obama’s handling of the economy was significantly underwater. To make matters worse for the Obama-Biden ticket, Mitt Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan, had a solid bounce in late August following the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, and caught Obama in the poll average.
Then Bill Clinton was called in off the bench at the Democratic National Convention to deliver a data-heavy yet folksy case for the Obama economy. After the Arkansan’s barnburner, Obama famously dubbed Clinton the “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” In the CBS/New York Times poll question regarding handling the economy, taken before the Democratic National Convention, Obama was 15 points underwater. Right after the party convened in Charlotte, North Carolina, the gap in handling the economy was just two points, within the margin of error. And Obama re-opened a lead over Romney.
Obama would soon lose that polling lead after a very shaky first debate. Still, a continued decline in the unemployment rate heading into Election Day, 2012, helped get the incumbent over the finish line.
So, maybe all Biden needs to do is keep pushing his we’re-on-the-right-track message and wait for it to click in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer and beyond.
But clearly, the Biden team thought things would be clicking by now, and they don’t want to wait any longer. They want to jumpstart the campaign now.
Could a debate provide that jumpstart?
The answer is yes.
Plenty of debates prove politically meaningless. Either the debate ends in a tie, or the “winner” (as determined by pundits or instant polls) doesn’t benefit in the polls. In 2004, Gallup polling concluded Senator John Kerry won all three debates against President George W. Bush, and indeed, Kerry narrowed the gap in post-convention polling against the Republican incumbent. But the Massachusetts Senator never closed it. We have few if any, examples that definitively prove that a debate turned a presidential candidate from likely loser to Oval Office occupant.
But we do have examples of post-debate poll bumps. Romney in 2012 and Kerry in 2004 both got them, even though they still lost. And we have many examples of such bumps in presidential primaries, even if most were short-lived.
A debate bump can’t revamp the fundamentals of race. For example, if a bad economy is dooming a nominee, a good debate isn’t going to fix the problem.
However, the fundamentals of this race should favor Biden. The economy is growing, unemployment is low, and inflation, while stubborn, is way down. Wages have been beating inflation for many months. No incumbent president in the era of modern economic data has lost reelection under these types of economic conditions. (President Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 reelection bid amid good economic conditions, but he was presiding over a deeply unpopular Vietnam War where American troops were dying in large numbers, stoking civil discontent.)
Biden has been gamely pushing an upbeat economic message, but that’s difficult to disseminate when the 24/7 news cycle is chaos all the time: from the border influx to campus unrest to the Trump trial.
The now agreed-upon June 27 debate on CNN and likely September debate on ABC are guaranteed media spectacles, pushing other news out of the way.
Biden will also enter June’s forum with rock-bottom expectations, in large part thanks to Trump, 77, who said yesterday, “Crooked Joe Biden is the worst debater I have ever faced. He can’t put two sentences together.” A fairer assessment would be that Biden has been an uneven debater during his 55 years in electoral politics but usually pulls out a good performance at crunch time.
If we see the confident president who dominated March’s State of the Union address cogently explaining how far the economy has come and reassuring the nation about its future, Biden may get that poll bump.
And a big enough bump may reset the race.
As I have noted, other first-term incumbent presidents needed some spark to rehabilitate sagging mid-term job approval numbers before the general election. In the fall of 1983, Ronald Reagan got that jolt with the military operation in Grenada. In 1996, Bill Clinton got that with a government shutdown that the public blamed on Congressional Republicans.
Such a spark has eluded Biden. So, a worried president has decided to strike a match himself.
