Eighty percent of voters say President Joe Biden is too old to run as former president Donald Trump now leads Biden by six points following last week’s debate, a new poll finds.
A new Wall Street Journal poll finds Biden trails his opponent 42 percent to 48 percent, with the president’s favorability rating dropping to 34 percent. Trump’s lead is wider than at any time since late 2021 when inflation had begun to kick in and Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was still fresh in voters’ minds.
The new survey data come after Biden’s troubling debate performance last week. The president frequently stumbled over his words and sometimes failed to string together coherent sentences to answer questions from CNN moderators and respond to attacks from Trump.
According to the new poll, 31 percent of independent voters said the debate made them more likely to support Trump. Compared to the WSJ‘s February poll, the percentage of all voters who now see Biden as too old to run has risen by seven points.
Biden’s performance has led to calls from fellow elected Democrats for the president to step aside. Two Democratic representatives — Raúl Grijalva (D., Ariz.) and Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) — publicly called Wednesday night for him to drop out.
“If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him, but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere,” Grijalva said in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times. “What [Biden] needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”
But almost any effort to remove Biden from the ticket would have to receive his consent, and the president’s comments to campaign staff Wednesday signal he intends to stay in the race.
“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running . . . no one’s pushing me out,” Biden said on the call, according to multiple sources. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”
A post-debate CBS poll showed similar results: Seventy-two percent of voters think Biden does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president.