More Democratic Voters Than Not Want Biden Replaced After Debate Performance

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President Joe Biden’s alarming performance in Thursday’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump hasn’t changed the state of the race overnight, according to a new Morning Consult survey. But there are warning signs for the Democratic incumbent, as more Democratic voters than not would like him to step aside. 

Our latest survey, conducted Friday, found 45% of voters support Biden and 44% support Trump. It’s the exact margin measured in our one-day survey conducted after Trump’s conviction in the New York hush-money trial late last month. It’s also similar to the 44%-44% tie we measured in our three-day moving average of surveys released Monday ahead of the first televised matchup. 

The comparison of the single-day surveys conveys the tightness of the race: Even uncomfortable moments for either candidate do little to shift the contours of the contest between the two well-known politicians.

However, Biden appears to be suffering from a confidence problem from the electorate — and most notably, among voters from his own party.

Three in 5 voters, including a 47% plurality of Democrats, said Biden should be replaced as the Democratic candidate for president. The figures are slightly higher among Democratic voters who watched the debate.

If Biden were to step aside, something his campaign has scoffed at in the aftermath of a showing that troubled many Democrats in Washington, Vice President Kamala Harris is the obvious front-runner to replace him. But it’s certainly not a unifying proposition for the party’s voters.

Three in 10 Democratic voters want Harris to take the reins were Biden to not be the party’s nominee, followed by 20% who said it should be California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who shook off questions about the matter while speaking with reporters after the debate.  

The consternation among Democratic voters comes after a debate that 4 in 5 voters (including a similar share of Democrats) tuned into at least part of, and the results were not pretty for the president. A clear majority of debate-viewing voters (57%) said Trump performed best on Thursday, including 19% of Democrats, 60% of independents and 93% of Republicans. 

That not only exceeds expectations for the presumptive Republican nominee set earlier in the week, but it also represents a much more decisive victory than Biden can boast from either of the 2020 debates, which he won by smaller margins, per our data.

The Biden campaign viewed last night’s debate as another opportunity to assuage concerns about his age and mental acuity. But our survey makes clear the outcome had the opposite of the intended effect: Among debate viewers, 78% said Biden is too old, compared with 64% of all voters who said the same days before the debate.

The shift on perceptions of Biden’s age was even larger among Democrats who tuned in: 64% of Democrats who watched the debate said he is too old, up from 43% among the larger Democratic electorate in the previous survey. 

Similarly, all voters and Democrats who tuned into the debate were less likely to say Biden was mentally fit or in good health, making clear that Thursday’s debacle threatens to reverse any progress on these questions that Biden saw after his State of the Union address.

How voters rated the moderators

CNN Political Director David Chalian ruffled some Democratic-leaning feathers online in the lead-up to the debate by saying they aren’t “the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise,” but the new rules and format for Thursday’s contest appears to have sat well with voters.

More than half of voters who viewed the debate said Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did an “excellent” or “good” job moderating the debate, significantly more than the share who said the same of Chris Wallace, then at Fox News, following the first debate of 2020.

However, reviews for Tapper and Bash still came in below what NBC News’ Kristen Welker scored in the final debate of 2020, when roughly two-thirds of voters graded her performance as at least “good.”

Bash and Tapper did secure one superlative when comparing their performance to Welker’s and Wallace’s in 2020: Voters who watched the debate found last night’s duo to be the most biased toward Trump.

While 10% of debate viewers said Tapper and Bash favored Biden in their steering of the discussion, 16% said they favored Trump. That’s a stark difference from 2020, when voters believed that both Wallace and Welker favored Biden over Trump by nearly 20-point margins.

The bottom line

On one hand, the post-debate survey provides one bit of good news for Biden: Even a performance like his on June 27 did not immediately shift the overall contest. However, the survey is only an early glimpse of public opinion about the president, who will now have to grapple in the coming days and months with the likelihood that voters’ concerns about his ability to do the job will only mount if debate viewers are any indication.