If history is any guide, President Biden’s weakness in the first debate may not translate into his ultimate defeat: incumbents often struggle to find their footing but end up being re-elected.
“Debate nights can be the worst. Trust me, I know.” Barack Obama wrote: “But this election is a choice between someone who has spent their whole life fighting for ordinary people and someone who only thinks about themselves,” he said on social media platform X Friday.
Biden faced scathing criticism from the media and reports of panic within the party after what many described as a disastrous matchup with Trump. Polls before the debate had the two candidates tied, but Trump gained a few points over the weekend after the debate.
Biden struggled to answer and appeared to stumble over his words, with Trump saying, “I have no idea what he just said.”Democratic governors are scheduled to meet with Biden later this week, and Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett on Tuesday became the first Democrat to urge Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and allow a new candidate to run against Trump.
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Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon cited history to defend the president’s performance, saying in an NBC interview, “Every sitting president that I can remember has had the worst first debate.”
“Obviously, the stakes are higher for us because we’re going up against Donald Trump,” she continued. “Obviously, the president is 81 years old, so there’s a lot more work to do. But the 2012 debate was also awful. I was there. I remember it vividly.”
Dillon argued that June was early enough in the campaign cycle for Biden to get back on track, as his predecessors had done.
Former President Trump appeared to receive strong support from Republican and independent voters participating in Fox News Digital focus groups in his response to President Biden’s claims on immigration. (Fox News Digital)
President Obama faced a severe test after his first debate with Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and woke up to headlines in liberal-leaning papers like The Washington Post including “Why Was President Obama So Bad?”
“President Obama Stumbles,” a Politico headline simply read after the Denver debate on October 3, 2012. The debate was the first of three in which President Obama emerged victorious for a second term despite the press pointing out weaknesses on the first night.
The Washington Post argued that Obama took to the stage in Denver “hardly the same man who won in a landslide victory in 2008.” Al Gore defended the president, arguing that Denver’s unusually high altitude may have caught him off guard.
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No one will forget how weak Ronald Reagan’s performance was in his debate with Walter Mondale in Louisville on October 7, 1984. Reagan held a commanding lead in the polls despite concerns about his age — at 73, he was the oldest man to hold the presidency at the time — but according to Slate magazine, the polls had narrowed the gap by seven points, reflecting the view that Mondale had crushed his opponent.
In 2004, after George W. Bush’s first debate with opponent John Kerry, polls showed that voters saw Kerry winning by a 2-to-1 margin. Pew Research Center While Bush maintained his lead overall, the gap “closed” the following weekend.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts, and Democratic presidential candidate President Barack Obama attend a presidential debate at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, on October 3, 2012. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In fact, Pew Research Center noted that for the first time in its 16 years of polling analysis, Democratic candidates performed better among that democratic group than among registered voters overall. The institute called the “high level of Democratic willingness to vote” “surprising” because only half of Democrats seemed confident that Kerry would win the election.
Many described President Bush’s response as “defensive” and “nervous,” while others described Secretary of State Kerry as “arrogant” and at times “indecisive. ” Survey participants also perceived President Bush as more “honest” than Secretary of State Kerry, who they described as more “confident.”
Republican candidate Ronald Reagan (left) and Democratic candidate Walter Mondale debate before the 1984 presidential election. (Corbis via Getty Images)
In the case of Bush v. Kerry, the Pew Research Center made it clear that voter motivations often took precedence over perceived performance during a one-off debate: Bush supporters were “overwhelmingly” more interested in voting for Bush than against Kerry, while Kerry supporters were more interested in opposing Bush than voting for Kerry.
Brett O’Donnell, a Republican communications strategist and president of O’Donnell & Associates, told Fox News Digital that sitting presidents tend to get distracted by the minutiae of policy and the major issues facing the country and “don’t take debate prep seriously.”
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“They’ve wrestled very deeply with these issues as candidates and as presidents,” O’Donnell said, “so I think they confuse knowing the issues with being able to perform in a presidential debate.”
“I call this the incumbency trap, but it’s actually even older than that. The first debate between Carter and Reagan was a disaster. So incumbents seem to forget that performance matters because … they need to know the issues.”
O’Donnell said she doesn’t like to assume one side has an advantage, but she believes the Republican Party has a “better message” that is more likely to connect with the American people.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry smiles as President George W. Bush (right) speaks at the podium during the first debate at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, on September 30, 2004. (David Hume Kennerley/Getty Images)
“It’s a message of the American Dream, that if you work hard and play by the rules, there are opportunities in this country that you can take advantage of,” O’Donnell explained. “The Democrats’ answer is always government, and I don’t think that’s a particularly effective message for the general public.”
“That may be true for a certain segment of the audience, but not for the American people as a whole. They want to believe in the American Dream, and the Republican Party has defended that for decades.”
As O’Donnell points out, several incumbent senators, starting with President Carter, performed poorly in the first debate and ultimately failed to prevail over their opponents, losing out on re-election.
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Fox News Digital reached out to several Democratic strategists but did not receive a response before publication.
