Analysis | The first debate reinforced Biden’s biggest weakness (2024)

So instead, the debates are opportunities for viewers to assess something less tangible: how the candidates handle the pressure of an uncomfortable situation. It’s not clear that this is a particularly useful proxy for anything presidential, but it’s what the debates offer. Here is your chance to see how the candidates react to each other.

Perhaps because the stakes are so constrained — and because so much of the response to candidates is baked into America’s fervent partisanship — these contests tend not to have much of an effect on the state of the race. And immediately after the debate, it’s certainly far too soon to suggest that this one will, either.

What we can say, though, is that the first hour in particular robustly reinforced President Biden’s most significant weakness. If anything might shift the polls or the trajectory of the race, that might be it.

Biden seemed tired. His voice was weak. He looked old — which he is, certainly, but which his team has insisted is not something that affects his ability to do the job. Perhaps it doesn’t, but in this debate, he also stumbled over his words or, at times, failed to find the words he was looking for completely. When he offered arguments, they were often confused or confusing. His team noted that he has a cold, which might be the worst-timed cold in American political history.

To put a fine point on it: Biden has very few opportunities to demonstrate to the public that his age is not a hindrance to what he wants to do, including this opportunity. He demonstrated the opposite.

There’s no question that the issue of Biden’s age — as you no doubt know, he’s the oldest president in American history — is a central point of concern to voters. New York Times-Siena College polling released this week asked Americans whether they were concerned about the candidates’ age. Two-thirds of likely voters said they were concerned about Biden’s age, with more than 4 in 10 saying they thought he was so old that he was incapable of serving as president. Only 1 in 5 said that about his opponent Donald Trump, most of them Democrats.

More than half of people planning to vote for Biden said that they agreed that he was too old to be effective as president. Of those, 1 in 8 said his age made him incapable of serving.

Biden’s supporters have argued that this is a function of negative news coverage, which was always a stretch (given, in part, that people are keenly aware of how old the president is). Even if that were the case, Biden’s debate performance served to bolster that idea rather than dispel it.

That the president has so much support is largely because of concern about Trump among his supporters. This is how you square the circle above: If you think Biden is too old to be capable of serving as president but you still plan to vote for him, you must really dislike the other guy. They do.

But concerns about age and capacity are unusually problematic because voters tend to consider elections through a forward-looking lens. Recent research indicates that elected officials and governments that enact policies with majority support don’t gain votes as a result. Instead, voters choosing between candidates often think about what a candidate will do. In doing so, they are necessarily looking forward, thinking about what is to come. After more time has passed. After the candidates have gotten older.

Again, it’s too early to say whether this debate will negatively affect Biden. It’s early, meaning fewer people watching and more time to regain ground. It’s early, too, in that we haven’t seen what the reaction that percolates out from the debate will be.

We can say this, though: The debate was a specific test of one of the things that Americans are most concerned about with the sitting president. He did very little to assuage those concerns. Maybe those concerns are baked into the poll numbers already. Or maybe, over the next few weeks, the poll numbers will shift.