From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro.

This is a special episode of the Daily.

Today, a major Times poll finds that since President Biden's poor performance in the first presidential debate,

voters doubts about his mental fitness have deepened and Donald Trump has taken by far his biggest lead of the campaign.

I spoke with my colleague Shane Goldmacher about what the results could mean for

Biden's future. It's Thursday, July 4th. Shane, thank you for coming on with not a ton of notice on a very busy day for you.

Happy to be on.

We don't normally publish an episode on a national holiday, July 4th, but we felt the results of this poll were significant enough

and newsworthy enough that it was worth departing from that tradition.

I mean, in the time that I've been to the times in covering our polls this has been by far the most anticipated poll that we've put out.

And the reason it's so anticipated is that tens of millions of Americans watched the debate last week.

And one of the biggest questions about Joe Biden's political future has been, how did

voters actually process what they saw on stage?

Right, what did they make of a Democratic nominee struggling openly at times to be coherent, to offer Kojan answers, would it affect the race?

That's been one of the fundamental questions and the storyline out of the White House and in Wilmington where Biden's campaign is headquartered. The storyline

the is in the story was just a blip.

They put out their own survey showing

that it hadn't made a change between before the debate

and after, notably they were behind in the survey that they

released themselves, but really people have been waiting for independent polling to take a look

at the state of the race after that debate.

Mm-hmm.

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