Can Biden come back from a bad debate the way Reagan did in 1984?

After President Biden’s surprisingly weak debate performance this week, some defenders have pointed to other incumbents who stumbled in their first debate but recovered to win reelection.

Presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan did it. The clear message these defenders want to convey is: Joe can too.

But can he? Are the situations comparable? Or is this more like the incumbents who stumbled in their first meeting with the opposing nominee and wound up leaving office after one term? That list is longer: Gerald Ford (1976) Jimmy Carter (1980), George H. W. Bush (1992) and Donald Trump (2020).

The most recent comeback story was Obama, who had an uncharacteristically flat first outing against Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 (Obama himself called it a “stinker”), then did fine in the second debate and won with 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206 in November.

But the classic and in some respects parallel case was Reagan’s 40 years ago, as he faced Democratic nominee Walter Mondale in Louisville, Ky.

Reagan was comfortably ahead in the polls that fall, cruising toward reelection, even if his age of 73 made him older than any previous president in history. But his performance that night on stage was alarming to his staff and supporters as much as to observers in general. The polls narrowed and the next issue of Time magazine had a cover illustration of two horses neck-and-neck and the headline: “A real race?”

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post, who had covered Reagan’s political career from his early California election bids in the 1960s through his presidency, wrote in his book Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, that Reagan had “not even cracked” his pre-debate briefing book. Cannon noted the staff had limited that