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Biden’s vulnerability has never been more apparent, but Trump remains too flawed to fully capitalize.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll confirms what most viewers sensed after last Thursday’s presidential debate: that it was a disastrous night for the 81-year-old President Biden, who looked unsteady, sounded sick, stumbled over his words and, at one point, lost his train of thought entirely.
A full 60% of Americans, for instance, now say Biden is not “fit to serve another term as president.” Just 24% say he is fit. The president’s fitness rating has only been that low once before, in November 2023, and it has never been worse.
Yet the survey of 1,754 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 28 to July 1, also shows that Biden (43%) remains statistically tied with his Republican rival, former President Donald Trump (45%), in a head-to-head matchup among registered voters — even after a performance that seemed to substantiate long-standing concerns about the president’s age and competence going forward.
In short, Biden’s vulnerability has never been more apparent — but Trump remains too flawed to fully capitalize.
A truly terrible debate for Biden
There is no sugarcoating Biden’s debate numbers. Roughly three out of every four Americans (74%) say they either watched the debate (56%) or saw enough video clips afterwards to have an opinion about how it went (18%). A full 84% of registered voters, meanwhile, report watching the debate (66%) or catching clips afterwards (18%).
Among that group of registered voters, a clear majority (57%) say Trump won the debate. Just 16% say Biden was the winner.
It’s rare, in our sharply polarized era, to see a margin that big. It’s also a stark shift from 2020. To put the president’s dismal debate numbers in perspective, the Yahoo News/YouGov surveys conducted in October of that year — which asked identical questions — found that Biden easily beat Trump among registered voters in their first debate (43% to 27%) while edging him in their second clash as well (48% to 41%). Still, in neither case did a majority of Americans name Biden the winner.
