2024 Elections

It was rough.

By Adam Wren, Steven Shepard, Natalie Allison, Elena Schneider and Sam Stein

06/28/2024 01:33 AM EDT

Link Copied

Joe Biden face-planted in one of the highest stakes moments of his political life — igniting widespread concerns among Democrats about his fitness as a candidate.

Debating former President Donald Trump with a raspy voice, wandering eyes, pallid complexion and a halting delivery, Biden’s performance was at times unintelligible. And though Trump blustered through his own answers with falsehoods, there was one defining issue: Biden’s age.

Democrats are reeling. The first debate is in the books. The second — and last — won’t come until Sept. 10, and that’s assuming it even happens. We asked five POLITICO campaign reporters and editors for their takeaways from the first general election debate of the 2024 campaign.

Is there any argument that Biden didn’t lose this debate? And just how bad was it for him?

Sam Stein: Is there an argument? Sure. Is it a convincing one? Absolutely not. Even his own former aides are acknowledging it was a bad night, that he looked and sounded weak and that he didn’t do the essential thing he had to do, which is to calm the very concerns about his age that prompted his campaign to get this debate scheduled in the first place.

How bad is it? What do we know? I could surmise that it’s anywhere between debilitating and ephemeral — likely closer to the former. What we do know: It’s going to prompt a vicious news cycle for the campaign and they know it.

Steven Shepard: No. By stumbling out of the gate — and repeatedly over the course of more than an hour-and-a-half — Biden reinforced everything that voters have been saying gives them pause about electing him to another term.

Significant shares of Biden’s own voters were already uneasy about his candidacy, and the president did little to reassure them. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in the run-up to Thursday’s debate, only 51 percent of likely voters who picked Biden over Trump said they wanted Biden to be the Democratic nominee. Nearly as many, 45........

© Politico