Donald J. Trump’s lead in the 2024 presidential race has grown after President Biden’s faltering debate performance last week, as concerns grow among Democrats and independent voters that Mr. Biden is too old to govern effectively, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed.
Mr. Trump now leads Mr. Biden nationally among likely voters, 49 percent to 43 percent, a three-point tilt toward the Republican just a week before the debate. It is the largest lead Mr. Trump has recorded in a Times/Siena poll since 2015. Mr. Trump leads even more among registered voters, 49 percent to 41 percent.
Doubts about Mr. Biden’s age and his sanity are widespread and growing. Majorities across every demographic, geographic and ideological group surveyed — including black voters and those who said they would still vote for him — believe the 81-year-old Mr. Biden is too old to be effective.
Overall, 74 percent of voters see him as too old for office, up five percentage points since the debate. Concerns about Mr Biden's age among Democrats have risen eight percentage points to 59 percent since the debate. The share of independent voters who said they feel that way has risen to 79 percent, roughly matching Republicans' view of the president.
The survey offers early empirical evidence of what many Democrats fear: that Mr. Biden’s faltering debate performance has further imperiled his chances against Mr. Trump this fall. Some Democratic lawmakers and donors are raising questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness to serve, given his difficulty getting his thoughts across or articulating a point of view during debates, and they are demanding that Mr. Biden prove to a skeptical public that he is capable of serving until age 86.
The survey also revealed some good news for Mr Biden.
One was that he narrowed Mr. Trump’s lead among independent voters, even though that lead was greater than his erosion among Democrats and Mr. Trump’s improvement among Republicans. Another was that the share of Democratic voters who think Mr. Biden should no longer be the nominee was far less than the growing Democratic concern about his age, which led to the first calls on Tuesday from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to remove him from office.
Overall, more voters believed Mr Biden should remain the Democratic nominee — but only because more Republicans, perhaps emboldened after the debate, were saying they now want him to be their opponent.
“If this was a boxing match, it would be a TKO in the first round — somebody please stop this,” George Lee, a 44-year-old health care consultant in Brooklyn, said of watching Mr. Biden endure one punch after another in the debate. “He’s not in his senses. That’s been obvious over the last week. They’ve been saying that for a long time, but the world has seen it.”
Mr Lee, a Democrat, said he wanted Mr Biden to step aside but would vote for him to stop Mr Trump. “There is no way he can win now,” he worried.
The survey also showed the depth of concern about Mr. Biden’s fitness. Half of voters go far beyond believing Mr. Biden is too old to be effective: A full 50 per cent agree that his “age is too big a problem to enable him to handle the job of president,” including 55 per cent of independent voters.
Voters also have some concerns about Mr Trump's age, but this concern is much less than that of Mr Biden.
After the debate, 42 percent of voters thought Mr Trump was too old to hold office, a three-point increase from the previous week, which was a Democrat-led poll. Only 19 percent of voters said Mr Trump was too old to hold office.
What the survey found most interesting was that nearly all of Mr. Trump's gains after the debate came from men.
Mr. Trump has made appeals to masculinity a central point of his 2024 campaign, making, for example, his first public appearance after a felony conviction related to paying a porn star to compete in a UFC bout.
Pre-debate polling had Mr. Trump ahead by 12 percentage points among likely male voters. After the debate, his lead among men grew to 23 points. This lead was particularly concentrated among young men and men without college degrees.
Mr. Biden’s five-point lead among likely female voters before the debate actually grew slightly, to eight points.
Those who said they watched the CNN debate in Atlanta said Mr. Trump won 60 percent of the vote, while he got 22 percent more than Mr. Biden.
Only 16 percent of voters said Mr. Biden did well, and a mere 3 percent said he did very well. In a time of intense partisanship, Democrats also felt Mr. Biden had failed.
About a third of Democrats said Mr Biden had performed well, while 89 per cent of Republicans said the same about Mr Trump.
The debate was watched live by more than 50 million Americans, and 59 percent of voters said they had watched it. Only 10 percent said they had not heard about the debate, 15 percent said they had heard about it and another 16 percent said they had watched clips later.
It was the last group, those who watched the clips, whose thoughts about Mr Biden's age problem were the most intense, perhaps because some of Mr Biden's most incoherent answers went instantly viral.
Among those who watched or heard clips about the debate but did not watch it live, nearly 80 percent thought Mr Biden had grown too old. Voters who watched the debate live or did not watch it at all were less than 70 percent.
The Times/Siena survey before the debate had appeared to be more favorable to Mr. Trump than the national average of surveys at the time. One interpretation was that Republicans were more responsive than Democrats when that survey was called for, perhaps a sign of enthusiasm after Mr. Trump’s conviction. A high response rate for a particular group is not necessarily an indicator of a false result. But even so, in this new survey, response rates between the parties returned to their usual level of parity.
On Wednesday, the Biden campaign prepared aides for potentially poor polling, and the Times/Siena survey in particular, in an internal staff memo.
“Polls are a reflection of the times and we should all expect them to continue to fluctuate,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote. They said internal metrics showed the race within the margin of error. The campaign had previously released a poll after the debate that showed Mr Biden trailing Mr Trump, but the campaign said the gap had not changed from before the debate.
In a Times/Siena poll that asked voters about potential third-party and independent candidates, Mr. Trump’s lead grew by two percentage points last week. After the debate, Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden 42 percent to 37 percent, when the poll included six potential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who received 8 percent support. Before the debate, Mr. Trump was ahead 40 percent to 37 percent.
The 2024 race features two candidates who are historically unpopular, and both candidates' unfavorable ratings rose slightly after the debate. Mr. Biden's rating rose to 61 percent and Mr. Trump's to 55 percent.
The Biden campaign had hoped that the debate — and seeing Mr Trump on stage in a way he hasn’t been seen since he came to the White House — would draw back into its fold some Democratic voters who are reluctant to support Mr Biden in 2024.
This survey, which like all others is a snapshot in time, showed no unity within the Democratic Party.
Mr. Biden's standing in the survey improved among black voters but weakened among Hispanic voters, though the sample size of both demographic groups in the survey was relatively small.
The survey also revealed deep generational rifts within the Democratic Party.
When it comes to Mr. Biden's suitability for another term, 77 percent of Democrats under the age of 45 think the president is too old to be effective, while only 49 percent of those over 45 agree.
Similarly, 56 percent of Democrats under the age of 45 approve of the job Mr. Biden is doing, while 90 percent of Democrats above that age have a positive opinion of him.
The debate also succeeded in achieving another of Biden's goals: getting voters engaged in the race. The share of voters paying a lot of attention to the campaign increased by 9 percentage points after the highly-publicized debate.
More voters in the survey said that re-electing Mr Biden in November would be a risky choice for the country, while fewer said so about Mr Trump. In the survey, 63 percent of voters said Mr Biden is a risky choice, while 56 percent said Mr Trump is risky.
Roughly one in four Democrats said Mr Biden is a risky choice rather than a safe choice; Republicans are nearly twice as likely to view Mr Biden as risky as they are to view Mr Trump as risky.
Even in April, voters considered these candidates equally risky.
Mr. Biden also faces other challenges beyond his age.
The economy and inflation were top issues for voters in Times/Siena surveys before and after the debate, and Mr. Trump is winning voters who highly prioritize these issues.
Moreover, voters remember Mr. Trump's tenure more fondly than Mr. Biden's. Only 34 percent said Mr. Biden made the country better, while 47 percent said the same about Mr. Trump's tenure. And for nearly every demographic group, more voters said Mr. Biden made the country worse rather than better. Black voters were the biggest exception.
Voters, 50 percent to 39 percent, said Mr. Trump would best handle the issue they believe is most important facing the country.
Ruth Igielnik, Nicholas Nehamas And Camille Baker Contributed reporting.
Here are key things to know about the Times/Siena survey:
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We spoke to 1,532 registered voters from June 28 to July 2, 2024.
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Our surveys are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. About 93 percent of respondents for this survey were contacted by cellphone. You can see which questions were asked and in what order they were asked here.
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Voters for the survey are selected from the list of registered voters. The list contains information about the demographic characteristics of each registered voter, which helps us ensure that we reach the right number of voters from each party, caste, and region. For this survey, we made over 190,000 calls to more than 113,000 voters.
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To ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those who are willing to vote, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, such as people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of our respondents and the weighted sample under “Sample composition” on the methodology page.
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The margin of sampling error in surveys among registered voters is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. In theory, this means the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, although a number of other challenges create additional sources of error. When calculating the difference between two values — such as a candidate's lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.
You can see the full results and detailed methodology here. If you want to read more about how and why we conduct our polls, you can check out answers to frequently asked questions and submit your own questions here.