Who Will Win The First Biden-Trump Presidential Debate? – FiveThirtyEight
PUBLISHED Jun. 27, 2024, at 7:00 AM
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On Thursday night in Atlanta, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face off in the earliest presidential general-election debate in modern history — and with the race between them a pure toss-up, the stakes are high. The minute the cameras turn off, you’re sure to hear partisans and pundits alike anointing a “winner” and “loser” based on their judgment of each candidate’s performance.
But only one judge really matters here: the American people, and we can’t truly know who won the debate until we hear from them. That’s why 538 is once again partnering with Ipsos to poll the same likely voters both before and after the debate to see how — and whether — their views on the 2024 election change. The charts below show where public opinion stands heading into the debate; on Friday, we’ll update this page with the results of our post-debate poll to see if anything has shifted.
We asked respondents how they expected each candidate to do on a five-point scale from “excellent” to “terrible” and converted each answer to a number on a 1-to-5 scale. “Excellent” was equal to 5, “very good” was equal to 4, “about average” was equal to 3, “poor” was equal to 2 and “terrible” was equal to 1. Scores were then averaged to create an overall expectations score for each candidate. Respondents who answered “don’t know” to the expectations question were excluded.
Debates are an expectations game; candidates are often judged less on their actual performance and more on whether they performed better or worse than expected. So, to get a sense of how well Americans think each candidate will do in the debate, our poll asked likely voters how they expected Biden and Trump to perform on a five-point scale from “excellent” to “terrible.” From this, we calculated an average expectations score for each candidate.1Average scores were calculated by assigning a 1-to-5 score to each answer to the expectations question (where “excellent” was equal to 5, “very good” was equal to 4, “about average” was equal to 3, “poor” was equal to 2 and “terrible” was equal to 1) and then averaging them. Respondents who answered “don’t know” to the expectations question were excluded.
According to our poll, which was conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, expectations are relatively low for both candidates, but especially for Biden. On average, likely voters gave him an expectations score of 2.58 out of 5, halfway between “about average” and “poor.” That could be an advantage for the president; if he turns in even an average debate performance, he will exceed many Americans’ expectations.
Biden’s low expectations score is probably related to concerns about his advanced age — and Republican efforts to depict him as doddering and foolish. We also asked respondents to our poll to evaluate the candidates’ fitness for the presidency on a similar five-point scale.2The options here were “excellent,” “good,” “mixed,” “poor” and “terrible.” We calculated average scores the same way we did for expectations. On average, they gave Biden a 2.3 out of 5 on physical fitness and a 2.4 out of 5 on mental fitness. (He rated higher, 2.8 out of 5, on emotional fitness.)
Trump, meanwhile, got a mean expectations score of 2.96 out of 5, placing him at just about average. That’s in spite of the fact that likely voters don’t think Trump is very emotionally or mentally fit to be president either; he came up just short of Biden on emotional fitness, with a score of 2.6 out of 5, but bested Biden on mental fitness, scoring 2.8 out of 5. The biggest difference between the two came on their physical fitness for the job, with Trump receiving a mean score of 3.1 out of 5.
Respondents could pick multiple candidates.
Of course, we also wanted to get a sense of how much potential support each candidate has going into the debate, so we asked voters which candidates they were considering voting for. (Note that this was not a traditional horse-race poll; respondents could say they were considering voting for multiple candidates. Additionally, all numbers in this article exclude respondents who skipped the question, which is why our numbers sometimes differ slightly from those on Ipsos’s website.)
As is befitting a toss-up race, almost exactly the same share of likely voters said they were considering voting for Biden (44.5 percent) as said they were considering voting for Trump (44.8 percent). Meanwhile, 18.5 percent of likely voters said they were considering independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who failed to qualify for the debate.
Our poll also asked whether voters had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each candidate. To no one’s surprise, both Biden and Trump are unpopular: Biden’s net favorability rating is -21.4 percentage points, while Trump’s is a little better at -17.1 points. Kennedy is underwater too, with a -19.5-point net favorability rating, but a lot of likely voters (27 percent) don’t have an opinion of him or have never heard of him.
Of course, many voters have a favorable view of Trump but not Biden or vice versa, but a sizable share — 21 percent, according to our poll — dislike both major candidates. Often called “double haters,” these voters face a difficult choice in November, and the way they break will probably decide the election. However, our poll suggests one thing that many of them won’t do is vote for Kennedy: Among the double haters, he has a 24 percent favorable rating and a 42 percent unfavorable rating, meaning many voters are actually triple haters!
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We also asked likely voters what issues would have the most impact on how they’ll vote this fall. (Respondents were allowed to select up to three issues from a list of 18.) The most common response was inflation or increasing costs, which 50 percent of likely voters cited as one of their top issues. That was followed by immigration (37 percent) and political extremism or polarization (25 percent).
That issue prioritization favors Trump. Our poll also asked voters which candidate they thought was better to handle some of these issues, and voters trusted Trump more than Biden on both inflation or increasing costs (55 percent to 45 percent) and immigration (56 percent to 44 percent). Meanwhile, voters perceived Biden as better able to handle some less prioritized issues, like political extremism or polarization (54 percent to 46 percent) and abortion (57 percent to 43 percent). We’ll ask voters this same question after Thursday’s debate to get at whether the candidates were able to change Americans’ perceptions of how they’d handle the issues.
All the data presented here comes from polling done by Ipsos for 538 using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. This first wave of the poll was conducted June 20-25 among a general population sample of adults, with 5,058 respondents who said they were likely to vote in the 2024 general election. For the likely voter subset of respondents, the poll has a margin of error of ±1.55 percentage points. Click here for a full methodology.
Editing and project management by Tia Yang. Copy editing by Cooper Burton. Quantitative editing by Geoffrey Skelley. Visual editing by Katie Marriner. Additional contributions by Mary Radcliffe and Holly Fuong. Original design and visual editing by Humera Lodhi and Christopher Groskopf. Art by Gabe Vogl.
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