Turns out Joe Biden’s debate performance is looking a whole lot better in the real world than it did to insiders

| 9:09 am EDT June 30, 2024
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In the minutes after President Joe Biden’s debate performance – and even while it was still going on – everyone tripped over each other to declare it a “disaster.” The talking heads on MSNBC and CNN said he should be replaced on the ticket. And the most common tweet of the night was “I’m a Democrat and I like Biden but he was a disaster tonight.” It was one of those things that every political insider and enthusiast agreed on in the moment, as if it were the most true thing of all time. Yet as the real world begins to provide feedback on the debate, it’s starting to paint a very different picture.

Since the debate, Biden has massively out-fundraised Trump by a nearly two to one margin. But, you’ll say skeptically, couldn’t this have merely been a bunch of desperate Biden supporters trying to bail him out of a bad night?

Okay, then how to explain this one. CNN, which hosted the debate, held a focus group of uncommitted voters. After the debate, half of them said Biden won the debate. Univision also hosted a focus group. After the debate was over, most of the undecided voters in that group announced they were voting for Biden.

These kinds of focus groups have their own problems. But they do provide a glimpse into how the real world views these kinds of things. Most Americans don’t follow politics on a daily basis. They don’t watch cable news. They don’t follow political Twitter. They haven’t heard Biden or Trump speak in years. They tuned in for the debate without any expectations. And many of them came out of it thinking Biden had a better debate night than Trump.

How can this be? I think it’s a fairly simple explanation: those of us who closely follow politics went into the debate with certain expectations that weren’t met. We know that Biden usually comes off as super sharp and fairly energetic when he speaks. We know that Trump usually comes off as lost and confused and full of gibberish when he speaks. When we watched the debate, we saw Biden underperform his usual sharp self because he was sick. We saw Trump outperform his usual senile self in a frankly suspicious manner. And so we interpreted that as a “disaster” for Biden and thus a big win for Trump.

But in reality, an illness-compromised Biden and an unusually sharp Trump ended up looking a lot like each other during the debate. If you were tuning in solely to see who was more “with it” then you came away with no real conclusions. And if you were tuning in solely for the issues, since Biden’s positions are far more popular than Trump’s positions, then you were more likely to come away siding with Biden than with Trump.

It all serves as a good reminder that the way those of us on the political “inside” see things is very different than the way that average Americans on the “outside” see things. We saw Biden disappointingly underperform and Trump curiously overperform and we raced to label it a disaster for Biden. But when it comes to the people whose votes aren’t yet decided, and therefore actually count, Biden’s worst day and Trump’s best day ended up looking very similar. In the real world, this debate was essentially a tie. And Biden will be fine.