Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Will the first presidential debate change more minds?

We begin today with Dan Balz of The Washington Post wondering if Thursday’s upcoming presidential debate will move the needle of what has been a largely static presidential race.

For the better part of a year, the contest between Biden and Trump has been a flat line in the polls, with Trump holding the narrowest of advantages in national polls and a slightly larger advantage in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. This has made Democrats increasingly nervous. Why? Because Biden never trailed Trump in Washington Post-ABC News national polls in 2020.

Recently, there has been some movement in Biden’s direction. It has come since Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in the New York trial involving hush money payments to an adult-film actress and the falsification of business records. The movement is incremental at best, leaving the two candidates still in a statistical dead heat nationally. The battleground states remain competitive, though Trump has had a narrow advantage in more of them than Biden this year.

An aggregation of national polls in June, compiled by The Post’s polling unit, currently shows Biden leading Trump in a two-way race by two-tenths of a percentage point. In March, just ahead of the president’s State of the Union address, Trump was leading by 1.2 percentage points. With third-party candidates included, the current poll average shows the two tied, compared with a Trump lead of six-tenths of a percentage point in May. Overall, a small change.

Considering the tightness of the presidential race to this point, any movement—even incremental movements in the polls— are highly significant.