These are all national polls. If you’re wondering who might do better in the specific battleground states crucial to winning the Electoral College vote, we simply don’t have data.
Do other Democrats actually poll better against Trump than Biden?
What the data says, and what it means.
What we don’t know
Still, it’s too soon to tell just what the American people are thinking about replacing Biden with an alternative.
Plenty of political developments and newsworthy events are still unfolding, influencing how people think about Thursday night.
And even the one poll everyone has been referencing since Thursday should be viewed with a grain of salt, Jackson told me, since it was put together and fielded quickly, opening it up to some bias, since it’s taking stock of the type of people who would be willing to answer questions about the debate almost immediately.
“We won’t know for two or three weeks how all of this bakes into the numbers, and now we have the immunity case stacked on top of it, so it’s possible that we’re not ever going to really know how this one event played out,” she told me.
Next, we are dealing in hypotheticals. Any talk about how a Biden alternative would fare against Trump is purely imaginary at this point: we don’t really know how well any of these candidates would do among specific kinds of voters or in different states or regions. How would Whitmer do in the Sun Belt? How would Newsom do in the Midwest? Those questions are crucial to winning the Electoral College, and the polls we have don’t come close to answering them.
Nor do we know how any of these candidates would get to the top of the ticket, and how their path would influence their popularity (or lack thereof). Would the nomination flow to Harris, who seems like the logical successor despite years of negative coverage? Would she be passed up in favor of Newsom, Whitmer, or Shapiro — and if so, how would the Democratic base, especially Black voters, respond to the first Black female vice president being sidelined so publicly? Would this all be fought out at the floor of an open convention in Chicago? And would all that chaos end up dealing the eventual nominee the same kind of damage that Biden’s age is dealing him right now?
But there are, broadly speaking, two ways to look at the data we do have.
The first is that the polls show hypothetical Biden alternatives would do no better than Biden (generally what Biden defenders say). The second is that they are doing just as well as Biden without even running as actual presidential candidates — and could do better still (what Biden critics say).
But neither side can fully claim to be right, and there are strong counterarguments to both sides. The DFP poll, for example, shows that Harris, post-debate, still has a better favorability score than Biden, and is doing better than the president with women, Latino voters, and young voters — groups that Biden has struggled with overall. Philip Bump at the Washington Post did some digging on this question last week as well, comparing Harris and Biden’s favorability ratings among subgroups before the debate, and found Harris seems to be viewed more favorably by younger voters, women, and non-white voters.
At the same time, respondents are likely still not seeing Harris or alternatives as actual options, instead seeing these names as stand-ins for a “generic Democrat” — anyone who is not Joe Biden. Each of these alternatives is less well known than Biden in DFP’s poll; unless you’re super plugged into political news or from the Midwest, you probably don’t know who Gretchen Whitmer is; if you know of Gavin Newsom, you probably have strong feelings about him.
Whitmer, Shapiro, and Buttigieg, for example, all have better net favorability ratings than Biden or Harris in the DFP poll, but many respondents say they haven’t heard enough about these people to form an opinion. For Shapiro, Whitmer, and Buttigieg, the share of respondents who haven’t heard of them is much larger than the share who can form a positive or negative opinion. Newsom is the best-known of these alternatives, but he’s also disliked nearly as much as Biden, and more than Harris.
Being little-known isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To optimists about the alterna-Bidens, it means that there is more room for these candidates to grow, for the public to get to know them, and to put forward a new, positive message.
But there’s also a pessimistic side: You’re less publicly vetted and more vulnerable to skeletons in the closet. Many would also be trying a first national campaign on the highest-stakes platform possible.
In short, we don’t know much. These are all hypotheticals we’re trying to game out from a very limited set of data. And we’re likely to get a bunch more data as we move further from the debate. As that happens, Jackson urged a word of caution.
“I think we're in a position where there's so much going on that we haven't seen before that we should treat polling skeptically and as what it is: a snapshot of what opinion looks like in the moment that could change.”
Update, July 2, 1 pm ET: This story, published July 2, has been updated to include new polling on alternative candidates.