Do other Democrats actually do better against Trump than Biden?

If the goal of national Democrats is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House to protect democracy — and they’ve largely framed the 2024 election in just those existential terms — who is best equipped to do it? And after a dismal debate performance by President Joe Biden last week, is it possible that there is another Democrat better equipped to beat Trump than the sitting president?

Polling gives us one way to answer that question. But it’s not as simple as looking at the topline numbers and deciding that it’s time to dump Biden. The only timeline for which we know anything, solidly, is the one we’re living in: anything else is purely hypothetical, and requires some suspension of belief, some scrutiny in looking at numbers, and some skepticism in how we might expect the public to react.

What we know: The data shows a wash

There are a few different ways to judge how a hypothetical non-Biden candidate might fare against Trump:

1. Head-to-head polling, which asks voters who they would vote for: Trump or [insert Democrat here]? 

Polls taken before Thursday all largely deliver the same answer: any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — performed about the same, or worse, than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they’d vote in head-to-head matchups.

In averages of national polls fielded between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden by about 2.3 percentage points, per tracking by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.

More recently, a New York Times/Siena College poll asked this question of likely voters. Harris received the support of about 42 percent of respondents against the 48 percent who said they’d back Trump, trailing by 6 points. Biden, by comparison, received the support of 44 percent of respondents against Trump’s 48, trailing by 4 points. The 2-point gap is within the margin of error, so there’s little daylight between Biden and his vice president.

Less polling data exists for non-Harris alternatives. Back in February, Carlson also compiled the results of different polls in that same period that asked voters to choose between Trump and Whitmer, Newsom, Buttigieg, or Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. All those polls were conducted at various points in those 11 months, by different pollsters, about different hypothetical matchups. He found that only Manchin did better than Biden — but based on just one poll. 

Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump in every poll in which he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but that’s also based on only two polls.

Even more recently, a new CNN national survey of registered voters taken in the two days after the debate gives us one more data point. It’s one that suggests these alternative candidates could do a bit better than the president. Biden still trails Trump by 6 points, the same margin as before Thursday. When compared to Trump in hypothetical match-ups, Buttigieg, Newsom, and Whitmer all trail by about 4 or 5 points. Only Harris does significantly better: down by 2 points against Trump.

2. Who’s better-liked?

Another way to ask this question is to look at the favorability ratings of Biden, Biden alternatives, and Trump. Biden and Trump are both historically disliked political figures —  Biden himself is the most unpopular modern president since … Trump. The latest source of information we had before the debate is the Economist/YouGov’s poll from the last week of June, which asked about approval ratings for Trump, Biden, and Harris.

The poll found that Trump is disliked by 57 percent of Americans and liked by 39 percent, putting him at -18 percent. Biden is viewed similarly: disliked by 58 percent of the public and liked by 39 percent, placing him at -19 percent. 

Harris does slightly better: disliked by 54 percent, and liked by 37 percent, placing her at -17 percent.

In other words, Harris is viewed slightly less negatively than Biden is, but she isn’t significantly more popular.

The latest CNN poll shows this too: Harris has a negative net favorability rating, -20, similar to Biden’s -24. Meanwhile, Trump’s is -15.

Polling aggregates of favorability ratings show something similar. In the Real Clear Politics average, Harris holds a -15.4 point rating; Biden stands at -15.9; Trump stands at -11.2. Biden and Harris are viewed roughly the same.

Since the debate, we really only had one clear source on how Americans view these figures: a Data for Progress flash poll fielded the day after the debate. This one poll of about 1,000 likely voters has been the key evidence used by Biden defenders and Biden critics to make their cases, but it shows pretty much what we saw before the debate: no alternative candidate does better than Biden against Trump.

In terms of vote share, Harris performs roughly the same as Biden, garnering the support of 45 percent of likely voters against Trump’s 48 percent. Other Democrats, like Buttigieg, Newsom, Whitmer, and Shapiro, win slightly smaller shares of the electorate — anywhere from 44 to 43 percent of likely voters. But at the same time, in those matchups, the share of undecided voters grows. Trump’s support, meanwhile, stays steadily between 46 and 47.

“What we’re seeing pretty frequently is that Trump’s numbers are pretty solid. Trump doesn’t move much,” Natalie Jackson, a pollster and vice president at the GQR public opinion research firm, told me. “He stays pretty steady right around where he was in 2020.”

These are all national polls. If you’re wondering who might do better in the specific battleground states crucial to winning the Electoral College vote, we simply don’t have data.

What we don’t know

Still, it’s too soon to tell just what the American people are thinking about replacing Biden with an alternative. 

Plenty of political developments and newsworthy events are still unfolding, influencing how people think about Thursday night.

And even the one poll everyone has been referencing since Thursday should be viewed with a grain of salt, Jackson told me, since it was put together and fielded quickly, opening it up to some bias, since it’s taking stock of the type of people who would be willing to answer questions about the debate almost immediately.

“We won’t know for two or three weeks how all of this bakes into the numbers, and now we have the immunity case stacked on top of it, so it’s possible that we’re not ever going to really know how this one event played out,” she told me.

Next, we are dealing in hypotheticals. Any talk about how a Biden alternative would fare against Trump is purely imaginary at this point: we don’t really know how well any of these candidates would do among specific kinds of voters or in different states or regions. How would Whitmer do in the Sun Belt? How would Newsom do in the Midwest? Those questions are crucial to winning the Electoral College, and the polls we have don’t come close to answering them.

Nor do we know how any of these candidates would get to the top of the ticket, and how their path would influence their popularity (or lack thereof). Would the nomination flow to Harris, who seems like the logical successor despite years of negative coverage? Would she be passed up in favor of Newsom, Whitmer, or Shapiro — and if so, how would the Democratic base, especially Black voters, respond to the first Black female vice president being sidelined so publicly? Would this all be fought out at the floor of an open convention in Chicago? And would all that chaos end up dealing the eventual nominee the same kind of damage that Biden’s age is dealing him right now?

But there are, broadly speaking, two ways to look at the data we do have.

The first is that the polls show hypothetical Biden alternatives would do no better than Biden (generally what Biden defenders say). The second is that they are doing just as well as Biden without even running as actual presidential candidates — and could do better still (what Biden critics say).

But neither side can fully claim to be right, and there are strong counterarguments to both sides. The DFP poll, for example, shows that Harris, post-debate, still has a better favorability score than Biden, and is doing better than the president with women, Latino voters, and young voters — groups that Biden has struggled with overall. Philip Bump at the Washington Post did some digging on this question last week as well, comparing Harris and Biden’s favorability ratings among subgroups before the debate, and found Harris seems to be viewed more favorably by younger voters, women, and non-white voters.

At the same time, respondents are likely still not seeing Harris or alternatives as actual options, instead seeing these names as stand-ins for a “generic Democrat” — anyone who is not Joe Biden. Each of these alternatives is less well known than Biden in DFP’s poll; unless you’re super plugged into political news or from the Midwest, you probably don’t know who Gretchen Whitmer is; if you know of Gavin Newsom, you probably have strong feelings about him.

Whitmer, Shapiro, and Buttigieg, for example, all have better net favorability ratings than Biden or Harris in the DFP poll, but many respondents say they haven’t heard enough about these people to form an opinion. For Shapiro, Whitmer, and Buttigieg, the share of respondents who haven’t heard of them is much larger than the share who can form a positive or negative opinion. Newsom is the best-known of these alternatives, but he’s also disliked nearly as much as Biden, and more than Harris.

Being little-known isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To optimists about the alterna-Bidens, it means that there is more room for these candidates to grow, for the public to get to know them, and to put forward a new, positive message. 

But there’s also a pessimistic side: You’re less publicly vetted and more vulnerable to skeletons in the closet. Many would also be trying a first national campaign on the highest-stakes platform possible.

In short, we don’t know much. These are all hypotheticals we’re trying to game out from a very limited set of data. And we’re likely to get a bunch more data as we move further from the debate. As that happens, Jackson urged a word of caution.

“I think we’re in a position where there’s so much going on that we haven’t seen before that we should treat polling skeptically and as what it is: a snapshot of what opinion looks like in the moment that could change.”

Update, July 2, 1 pm ET: This story, published July 2, has been updated to include new polling on alternative candidates.