‘Dead heat’: Biden ahead or tied with Trump in two new post-debate polls
Two new just-released national polls taken well after the June 27 presidential debate show President Joe Biden tied with or one point ahead of Donald Trump. This comes after a new study released Wednesday found the presidential debate "had little if any impact" on voters' preference, and showed President Biden retained more of his supporters than Donald Trump did.
The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Thursday morning "finds Biden and former president Donald Trump in a dead heat in the contest for the popular vote, with both candidates receiving 46 percent support among registered voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to the results of an ABC-Ipsos poll in April," The Washington Post reported.
The "dead heat" was not the headline at The Post, which instead reported: "Most Democrats want Biden to drop out, but overall race is static, poll finds."
That poll "finds that 56 percent of Democrats say that he should end his candidacy, while 42 percent say he should continue to seek reelection. Overall, 2 in 3 adults say the president should step aside, including more than 7 in 10 independents."
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And in a large sample poll released Wednesday from Split Ticket and Data For Progress, Joe Biden beats Donald Trump by one point in a head-to-head match. That same poll found Donald Trump beats Joe Biden by one point when factoring in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (10%) and Cornel West, Jill Stein, and Chase Oliver, each grabbing 1% of the vote.
Split Ticket reports their polling results are "actually better for the President than the apocalyptic picture that some other polls have painted in the wake of his disastrous debate, which has sparked nonstop talk of replacing him among party officials — for example, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found Trump up by six among likely voters."
The Split Ticket/Data For Progress poll is "the largest national survey sample I’ve seen post-debate and it was conducted by some of the best data science guys in the business," says Latino GOP political consultant Mike Madrid, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project.
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"This is the downside risk calling on Biden to step aside — if race is still competitive, it divides the party at worst possible time & creates tail risk that bottom will fall out for down ballot Dems," writes conservative Josh Kraushaar, editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider, in his response to the Post/ABC/Ipsos poll. "And no guarantee Harris runs ahead of Biden— even with a clean handover."
All this new data comes, as Split Ticket noted, on the heels of two weeks of post-debate polls that almost exclusively found Donald Trump to be leading President Biden.
According to data NCRM examined from FiveThirtyEight's polling average, in just over 100 polls (actually, polling questions) taken after the June 27 debate, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a slate of many notable Democrats every time except for fifteen. Of those fifteen, in six Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris were tied with Trump, and in six Biden or Harris beat Trump.
(In one, Michelle Obama, who is not running, beat Trump by 12 points.) FiveThirtyEight's polling average currently puts Trump over Biden by 2.1%, his strongest lead since March, where he took a 2.4% lead.
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