49 percent say Democrats should nominate someone other than Biden: Survey

Close to half of Americans believe the Democratic Party should replace President Biden in the 2024 election, per a YouGov poll conducted the morning after the first presidential debate. 

Of those polled, 49 percent said Biden should be replaced at the top of the ticket for the party to have the best chance of winning, while 30 percent said he should remain. In the same poll, 44 percent of Americans surveyed said former President Trump should remain as the nominee, while 38 percent said he should be replaced.

The poll was taken the morning after a disastrous debate for Biden. Within the first few minutes of the debate, Democrats began to panic over Biden’s lackluster debate performance. Rambling at times, Biden appeared to have a sore throat and lost his train of thought repeatedly during the debate. While Trump made several inaccurate claims, he was forceful and direct in speaking.

Biden’s performance quickly led to a flurry of anonymous senior Democratic elected officials and donors calling for Biden to step down and for an open Democratic convention in August.

Since the debate, surrogates for the Biden campaign and the campaign itself have said that Biden will not step down and that Democrats should stop “hand-wringing” in public. At a rally in North Carolina on Friday, Biden said, “I don't debate as well as I used to but I know how to do this job.” 

In the YouGov poll about replacing Biden, 50 percent of independents said the Democrats should replace Biden, while 29 percent of Democrats said he should stand down. 

A majority of voters aged 45-64 also said Biden should be replaced, with 54 percent saying someone else should take over. Half of voters over the age of 65 said he should be replaced. Meanwhile, 48 percent and 40 percent of voters 30-44 years old and 18-29 years old, respectively, said he should be replaced. 

A majority of white voters said they believe that Biden should be replaced, while only 30 percent of Black voters said a change is necessary. Among Latino voters, there is almost a 2-to-1 split in favor of Biden being replaced. Voters of color are a crucial block for Biden to win reelection. 

Even before the debate, Trump and Biden were the two most unpopular party nominees in at least the last three decades, according to Pew Research Group. An early June Pew poll found that 25 percent of Americans said that they had unfavorable views toward both candidates, which was close to double the number of people who had unfavorable views on Trump and Biden in 2020. 

A snap CNN poll showed that 67 percent of watchers said they believed Trump had won the debate, while only 33 percent believed Biden had won. A YouGov poll Friday morning showed that respondents believed Trump had won by a 2-to-1 margin. 

In contrast, during the 2020 debate, when Trump repeatedly interrupted and talked over Biden and the moderator, 60 percent believed Biden had won the debate.

YouGov polled 2,648 voters Friday morning, and the margin of error of the poll was 2.5 percentage points.