Opinion | No Poll Can Tell Biden What He Needs to Hear

“Will this be the thing that causes his voters to abandon him? How much will this hurt his numbers?” are questions that I, as a pollster, have been asked a lot over the past eight years. And the answers are almost always the same: You know, as crazy as it may seem, any one event might not move numbers very much.

That question has almost always been asked of me about Donald Trump. But since last week’s debate, the focus has shifted. I’m now being asked whether President Biden’s terrible performance on stage represents a breaking point with his voters.

The severity of the president’s seeming decline as seen in the debate may be a shock to many, but voters have long been sounding the alarm about Mr. Biden’s stamina and mental acuity. Mr. Biden’s polling was grim before he even set foot in Atlanta.

While the debate felt like a political earthquake, the polls so far have registered only a modest tremor. Mr. Biden was behind before, and he’s behind slightly more now.

As the American people think about the choice before them, pollsters have taken on a new, and in my view largely undeserved, level of importance in the monumental decision that faces Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. The answer to the question of whether Mr. Biden ought to attempt to stay in office another four years seems obvious, irrespective of the polling data. Yet the Democratic Party appears to be playing the wait-and-see game, hoping polls will give it permission to pull the emergency brake.

A flurry of public polls have for the last few days offered a mixed picture of the debate fallout. CNN found no movement from its Trump-up-six point lead pre-debate, while the Times/Siena poll shows Mr. Biden losing by nine points among registered voters — an eye-popping figure until you realize he was already down by six in a Times/Siena poll before the debate. CBS News’s polling showed a similar decline— from a one-point lead to a three-point deficit — for Mr. Biden in the margin among likely voters in battleground states, relatively modest and within the margin of error.