Six days after a lackluster debate between the presumptive party nominees, the effects of Biden’s shaky performance are starting to settle in.
The Biden campaign woke up this morning to a pair of concerning forecasts, involving the battleground states, setting the stage for more talk about whether the incumbent should remain at the top of the ticket.
Alarm bell #1: Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the nonpartisan elections handicapper at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, announced that it is moving Michigan — a crucial swing state — from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up” and shifting Minnesota from “likely Democratic” to “leans Democratic” in its Electoral College ratings, dealing another blow to the Biden campaign.
Both midwestern states are key to the Democratic coalition:
Michigan (15 electoral votes) has gone blue in every presidential election since 1992 except in 2016, when former President Trump won.
Minnesota (10 electoral votes) has broken for Democrats in every presidential election since 1976.
“In agreeing to the earliest-ever general election presidential debate, President Joe Biden sought to change the focus of this election from a referendum on himself to a choice between him and a flawed rival, former President Donald Trump. Needless to say, not only did Biden fail in this objective, but he exacerbated perhaps his biggest weakness — a widely-held belief that he is simply too old and diminished to lead the nation for another four years,” writes Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
TBT to last week when Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) — who is being floated as a Biden replacement — told Biden that the Wolverine State was no longer winnable for the incumbent after the debate. Whitmer dismissed that report.
More from Sabato’s Crystal Ball here.
Alarm bell #2: A new post-debate CBS News/YouGov poll is out today that shows Trump gaining steam on Biden nationally and in key battleground stages.
Note: the poll’s margin of error for registered voters is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points
NATIONALLY: Trump is leading Biden 50 percent to 48 percent among likely voters. When third party-candidates — such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein — are thrown in the mix, the former president leads the incumbent 44 percent to 40 percent among likely voters.
BATTLEGROUND STATES: Trump is leading Biden 51 percent to 48 percent among likely voters in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s a turnaround from last month, when the president led Trump 50 percent to 49 percent among likely voters
Dive in deeper with CBS News’s breakdown and the crosstabs
And then…: Shortly before publication, The New York Times’s Katie Rogers published a report that said Biden “told a key ally that he knows he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince the public in the coming days that he is up for the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.”
“He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a different place” by the end of the weekend, the ally told The Times, referring to Biden’s performance in the debate. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates called the report “absolutely false” in a post on social media platform X.
