DEBATE DAY BRINGS BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN. It’s only natural for pollsters and other political professionals to try to take the public’s temperature about a presidential race right before a big debate. The debate might have little effect on the race, or it might change everything, and the only way to know is to measure where the race was immediately before the event.

So, on Wednesday, we saw a wave of new polls and analyses that added up to terrible news for the campaign of President Joe Biden. The short version is that the race could be returning to the state it was in before former President Donald Trump’s trial and conviction in Manhattan. For a few weeks after the guilty verdict, it appeared that the contest, in which earlier this year Trump had a lead of between one or two points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, had, after the conviction, narrowed to less than one point, or perhaps Biden pulling ahead by a slight margin, as happened in the fivethirtyeight.com average.