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Viktor Orbán is expected to meet Vladimir Putin on Friday just after the Hungarian leader’s first wartime visit to Kyiv in what appears to be an attempt to act as a peace broker between Russia and Ukraine.

One Hungarian and two EU officials confirmed media reports that Orbán would meet Russia’s president on Friday.

Orbán has seen Putin twice since Russia’s leader ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has repeatedly held up EU aid for Kyiv and sanctions on Russia. But as Hungary took over the rotating presidency of the EU on Monday, Orbán made a surprise visit to Ukraine, where he spent three hours with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“I think it is his strategy to listen to both parties,” said one person familiar with the matter.

Charles Michel, the outgoing president of the European Council which represents EU leaders, posted on X on Thursday that “the EU rotating presidency has no mandate to engage with Russia on behalf of the EU”, adding that “Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine is the victim. No discussions about Ukraine can take place without Ukraine.”

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, did not respond to a request for comment. Peskov declined to confirm or deny reports that Orbán would visit Moscow to Russian state newswires, but promised Putin’s schedule on Friday would be “eventful”.

Orbán’s visit would be the first by an EU leader to Moscow since Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer made an unsuccessful effort to broker an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in April 2022.

Hungary’s prime minister defied his allies last year when he travelled to Beijing to become the first western leader to meet Putin after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes against Russia’s leader.

The upcoming trip to Moscow was first reported by Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist with the east European VSquare group.

Orbán on Monday suggested to Zelenskyy that Ukraine propose a deadline for a ceasefire that would pave the way for full peace talks with Russia. Hungary’s leader said he did not want to convince Zelenskyy, nor did he intend to make a specific proposal to Ukraine’s president — rather, he wanted to “learn the Ukrainian president’s position and its limits better during the negotiations aimed at peace”.

Zelenskyy said the leaders focused on “how to bring a just and lasting peace closer”. Previously he had maintained that any direct talks at this point in the war would amount to Ukraine capitulating.

Hungarian officials said Orbán was surprised at how optimistic Zelenskyy was about Kyiv’s chances to win the war on its own terms and recovering all of its territory from Russian occupation.

Despite its recent outreach to Ukraine, Budapest is maintaining its position, a Hungarian official said.

Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the same day as Orbán’s Kyiv visit in a sign that Budapest is pursuing a “multi-vectorial” approach, the official said.

Any peace efforts that did not involve Russia were meaningless, according to the Orban administration.

Zelenskyy and his chief of staff Andriy Yermak have said Russia would be invited to a second peace summit to be organised by Kyiv sometime later this year.

“Real peace negotiations can only take place if all warring parties are sitting around the table,” Szijjártó said in May.

Additional reporting by Christopher Miller in Kyiv

On Thursday, June 27, President Joe Biden had one of the worst debates for an incumbent president in recent memory. According to a 538/Ipsos poll conducted after the debate using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, the average debate watcher thought the president did “poor” (on a scale from “terrible” to “excellent”), and only 21 percent thought he performed best in the debate. By contrast, although former President Donald Trump turned in just an “about average” performance that included numerous lies, 60 percent of debate watchers told 538/Ipsos they thought he performed the best. And according to 538’s average, Trump’s margin in national polls has increased by 2 percentage points since the debate.

In the aftermath of Biden’s performance, the president has faced a barrage of calls to drop out of the presidential race to make way for a Democrat with a better chance of defeating Trump. Following a slew of articles written by its op-ed columnists, for example, The New York Times editorial board wrote, “The greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.” Even some elected Democrats have taken the extraordinary step of publicly suggesting he should step aside, with Rep. Lloyd Doggett writing on Tuesday, “Too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory.”

If Biden were to step aside, Vice President Kamala Harris is the most likely choice to replace him as the Democratic nominee — not necessarily because she is the best pick (this is impossible to test) but purely by virtue of her being first in line to the presidency. The million-dollar question, then, is whether Democrats would be better off with Harris as their nominee than with Biden.

That’s ultimately an unanswerable question, given the unprecedented and hypothetical nature of such a switcheroo, but we can attempt to quantify Harris’s odds of winning based on the (limited, imperfect) information we do have. So, as a thought experiment, we ran two different versions of the 538 presidential forecast with Harris as the Democratic nominee instead of Biden.

538’s election forecast, Harris-Trump edition

Let’s get one caveat out of the way: We don’t have that many public polls testing Harris against Trump. From April 1 through July 2, just over a dozen polls asked about this alternative matchup. But we do have polls from all the major swing states, thanks largely to tracking from Morning Consult, and we have enough national surveys to calculate a Harris-versus-Trump national polling average — and thus to forecast how she would perform in states without any polls.

For the most part, national polls have shown Harris doing about the same as Biden in head-to-head polls against Trump. In a March Fox News poll for example, Trump led Harris by 6 points and Biden by 5 points (well within the survey’s margin of error). And as recently as June 28, a Data for Progress poll showed the president and vice president each losing to Trump by 3 points (also within the margin of error). That said, a June 28-30 CNN/SSRS poll found Harris losing to Trump by only 2 points while Biden was trailing by 6. This was also within the margin of error but was nonetheless a bigger gap and could mark the beginning of a shift for Harris.

When we plug all these polls into a polls-only version of the 538 forecasting model — which jettisons the economic and political priors our full model uses, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates — Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100. On a state-by-state level, Biden looks stronger than Harris in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Harris’s odds are higher than Biden’s in Nevada.

Harris also does slightly better than Biden in our forecast of the national popular vote. The model forecasts that Trump would outpace Harris nationally by 1.5 points, while he would outrun Biden by 2.1 points. However, this could be an artifact of our model not having any Harris-versus-Trump polls that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tends to take slightly more votes away from Democrats than Republicans when included in a poll.

However, Harris’s popular-vote edge is almost entirely negated by the bigger Electoral College bias against her. In our polls-only forecast pairing Biden against Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by just 1.1 points to win the presidency. That’s thanks to Biden doing better in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in our model. Harris, by contrast, would need to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to win Pennsylvania and, with it, the Electoral College.

However, whether Harris would truly be a stronger candidate than Biden also depends on information besides the polls. In our full forecast model — which includes a variety of non-polling economic and political variables, which we call the “fundamentals” — Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.

This is thanks in large part to the boost our model confers on Biden as the incumbent president, which is worth an extra point for Biden over Harris in our fundamentals-only forecast of the national popular vote. However, one factor our model does not consider is whether presidents’ approval rating and economic growth impact incumbents running for reelection more than non-incumbents running from the same party, and that may actually push Harris’s numbers over Biden’s. In other words, your mileage may vary depending on how much you believe that Biden should get a boost because he’s the sitting president. There is no objectively correct answer here; one of the reasons election forecasting is hard is that it requires judgment calls like these.

Sometimes, it makes sense to bet on uncertainty

Biden’s core problem may not be captured in current polls, however. As his critics said after the debate, concerns about age and competency do not go away with time; in fact, they tend to get worse. Our forecast for Biden today depends on many known knowns and known unknowns, and, unfortunately for Democrats, the known downsides for Biden currently outweigh the known upsides. Another way of saying this is that Biden’s chief risk is a “hard” risk (as opposed to a soft one) — a product of an immutable trait that voters are unlikely to overlook by November.

Replacing Biden with Harris, by contrast, would introduce more uncertainty into the election; in other words, Democrats would be betting that her “soft” risks aren’t as bad as Biden’s. For example, Harris had one of the most left-leaning voting records during her time in the U.S. Senate, which could hurt her among moderate voters. Yet Biden already does poorly with moderates — and at current levels of political polarization, a cross-cutting issue like Biden’s age may make more of a difference with swing voters, anyway, than any narrow disagreements about policy.

At the end of the day, any decisions about whom the Democratic Party nominates for president will — or should — take more than just the polls into account. Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty around the alternatives for Biden. We have few polls for Harris, for example, and other alternatives are less well known and have not been vetted at the level a president or vice president is scrutinized at (just ask South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem). Until recently, that uncertainty was enough to hold calls for a new Democratic nominee at bay. But just as uncertainty creates more downside for a party, it also creates more upside. Given what Democrats have now realized about Biden, they may be willing to take that risk.

The first presidential debate served as a flashpoint for an election season that was hurtling toward a showdown between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Many were excited for the bout, others dreaded it and some were not sure it would even happen.

We wanted to understand voters’ reflections on the debate through the lens of their weekend news consumption. To do this, we asked six voters around the country to log all the debate-related media they saw or heard in the days after the event.

During the weekend, they noted news articles, social media posts on X, Instagram and Reddit, podcasts on YouTube, newsletters, clips from broadcast TV, and even texts with friends. They didn’t report seeing vastly different sentiments across these platforms and outlets — instead, there was somewhat remarkable unity over just how bad it all felt.

Here are the themes that emerged after a weekend of scrolling.

Biden’s Poor Performance

All six voters said they felt confronted with the reality of the president’s age in the content they saw.

Lauren Waits, a member of the state committee for the Democratic Party of Georgia, realized through her weekend reading how broadly her concerns about Mr. Biden’s performance were shared among fellow Democrats.

Most of her media consumption centers around reading articles from local and national news outlets on her phone. She also reads three or four politics-focused newsletters almost every day.

What stood out most to David Carlson, the treasurer of the Georgia Young Republicans, was the mainstream media’s reaction to Mr. Biden’s performance.

“Their shock comes as a surprise,” he said. “It’s not like they weren’t aware of the alleged health problems for President Biden.” What he saw after the debate only deepened his belief that the mainstream media is a “deeply unserious enterprise.”

Most of Mr. Carlson’s news comes from X, not from official news outlets, but from individuals whose analysis and commentary he trusts. He regularly watches podcast shows from Breaking Point and The People’s Pundit on Youtube.

Distaste for Both Choices, and Despair

Social media posts that expressed distaste for both candidates resonated especially with the younger voters in our group who plan to vote Biden.

Aaron Hernandez, a California voter, said that even though Trump performed better, he would not change his mind.

“I feel like I have a good grasp of his true character and dark agenda if he got a second term,” he said. “Both parties made poor choices with their nominees.”

“I would describe the Democratic establishment as frantic, in frenzy, in panic,” he added, after a weekend of seeing dozens of memes about the debate. “This is really bad because it seems like they don’t know what they’re doing. And they’re scrambling to come up with Plan B since they didn’t have one in place. I think they’ll be trying to convince Biden to step out but if he doesn’t, then what?”

Arina Trotter, a 20-year-old student from Bloomington, Ind., who is registered as an independent, tuned into the debate feeling fairly sure she would vote for Mr. Biden, but with little enthusiasm. She was surprised that she ended up feeling even more disappointed with the choices than she had been previously.

“I haven’t seen anything positive really,” she said. Instead, there were many posts about “a lack of faith in our democracy” and the “two-party system altogether, specifically because of the age of the two candidates and the repeat lineup, and a lot of disappointment with Biden’s performance.”

Jim Hauersperger, 71, of Unionville, Iowa, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but quickly soured on him, and was appalled by the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now, he said, “I don’t want to join the Democratic Party, but I left the Republican Party.”

A retired auto-manufacturing plant employee, Mr. Hauersperger gets nearly all of his news from network television. He doesn’t have cable T.V. or a smartphone. He has had only an internet connection at his house since December, and he does not read news online. “I don’t use it for anything other than if I need to go on and figure out how to fix my mower — stuff like that,” he said.

Over the three days immediately following the debate, he watched several network news segments. The coverage had left him more or less where he started. “I’m wishy-washy either way,” he said. “I’m not going to vote for Trump. But I don’t think I can vote for Biden either” — unless the race was close, in which case he thought he would vote for Biden. “What can you do?”

Few Issues, Many Memes

With focus on Biden’s poor performance, few issues or policies that came up during the debate surfaced in our voters’ media diets. The younger voters in our group saw many memes and jokes that entertained them.

Jonathon Ballard, 35, an assisted living facility staff coordinator from Green Bay, Wis., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, but has since turned against him, mostly on account of inflation and, later, immigration. Mr. Ballard said he plans to vote for Mr. Trump this year. He went to a Trump rally for the first time this spring. Still, he said, “I’m not that much into politics.”

Mr. Ballard saw only the last half-hour of the debate, and missed the next-day coverage on the evening news because he got home late from his job on Friday. What he saw about the debate over the weekend consisted of a handful of pro-Trump memes and videos he came across while scrolling through his mostly apolitical Facebook and Instagram feeds, or in texts from friends.

The videos — from a conservative religious account, a right-wing meme maker with a large online following, and a Republican congressman from Alabama — all focused on Mr. Biden’s visible struggles in the debate, with only one touching briefly on a policy issue, immigration.

“I already had my mind set on Trump” before the debate, Mr. Ballard said. “But coming out of it, I was like, ‘Biden’s done.’”