I get that people are going "but Trump!" but Trump has always been a incoherent, babbling idiot, that doesn't understand anything he's supposed to be doing and instantly folds as soon as he meets some foreign leader that intimidates him but also pretends to be his friend.
That's what Trump is, it's what he's been for years, it's what his base are happy to vote for.
This Biden is not what the democrats were expecting and I absolutely wouldn't want to try to work out what it means exactly for the numbers but I can't imagine that it's going to improve them!
Disclaimer; I only watched a few clips on the BBC and Biden was absolutely terrible in them.
It's fucken crazy that some are trying to spin this as "well Trump was bad too."
Assuming Biden stays in the race, there are only two possible ways you could spin this as "not that bad." 1) it's June 28th and 4 months from now, voters won't remember the first debate*. 2) only political junkies like us even watch debates and the vast majority of us aren't swing voters in battleground states.
* As long as Biden steadies the ship. Supposedly he was forceful at today's rally. Where was that last night? Even his few comments right AFTER the debate didn't seem as bad. If staunch loyalists like Paul Krugman are now saying Biden should step aside, that's pretty stark.
Little reason to look at snap polls today; we'll know the damage in about a week. (Betting markets tanked on Biden post-debate, Gavin Newsom is up to nearly 10%.)
For the record, almost all of us here are familiar with gaffe-prone Joe Biden. He's been that way for decades. Yesterday night was something else entirely; even if it's some weird one-off glitch in the matrix, you can't argue with a straight face that it wasn't damaging.