Debates are not about everyone watching. Many will absorb it the way I took in the glorious Boston Celtics playoff run: as partisans rooting unreservedly for victory, cheering every great moment and worrying about every mistake.
To the extent that partisans matter at all, they are likely to be Democrats who need constant hand-holding and reassurance that Biden can prevail. This, along with the 78-year-old Trump’s months-long denigration of Biden’s capacities at age 81, sets a low bar for Biden’s performance. Given his success at other big moments, such as his State of the Union addresses, he is likely to meet or surpass it.
But there is a trap here for Biden, too: Because the “age issue” has been raised relentlessly against him, the media have a tendency to overlook or downplay Trump’s many moments of incoherence and even lunacy. Biden and his lieutenants must turn this side-by-side performance into an opportunity to have the two men judged by the same standards.
With at least 80 percent of Americans locked into their preferences, this debate matters most for the relatively small number of Americans who will tip the balance. Who are these people?
“The most important slice of the electorate that will watch the debate is the low-engagement potential voter who hasn’t yet decided if it is even worth turning out to vote,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told me. “This type of voter is generally not in love with either candidate, is very open to third parties and will tune into the debate because it has a strange boxing-match entertainment type draw to it. For this type of voter, both persuasion and turnout are important goals.”
Whit Ayres, also a GOP pollster, points to a somewhat larger group: “at least half of the electorate who doesn’t want to vote for either man.” This group, he said in an interview, will be more influenced by “the candidates’ attitude and affect more than any particular issue positions.”
But issues — abortion, protecting democracy and health care for Biden and immigration, crime and the cost of living for Trump — will matter to other pieces of the electorate that are up for grabs. A canvas of pollsters and academic analysts suggests a series of subgroups that should be on the candidates’ minds: non-evangelical working-class voters, especially women; Black and Latino men; college-educated voters, particularly independents and Trump-skeptical Republicans; and voters under 35, many of them anti-Trump but whom Biden needs to persuade to cast ballots for him. The debate is likely to be a suburban excursion, Ayres said, since suburbanites are key to many of these groups.
“Demographically, I think it’s mostly women — independent and less educated — who are genuinely struggling with the cost of living but increasingly put off by Trump,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg told me. “They need a reason to vote for Biden. Abortion is a part of it, but it’s also, really, feeling like Trump is dangerous.”
Baiting Trump into outbursts that confirm such fears will be a central goal for Biden. Given Trump’s natural inclinations, this might not take much. Reminders of Trump’s 34 felony convictions or of how many of Trump’s former Cabinet members now denigrate him could do the trick.
Biden also needs to be more forward- than backward-looking. A bread-and-butter program for his second term — for example, more drug price caps, day care and elder care, child tax credits, and housing affordability — would appeal to many of the constituencies still on the fence. Biden would like nothing better than to persuade voters of how good his economic performance is compared with that of other national leaders and to argue his investment programs have lifted working- and middle-class voters more than anything Trump did.
But expect the president to be disciplined enough to resist the temptation to make the debate primarily about his record. He knows he wins the election if it’s primarily about Trump.
This suggests that the conventional wisdom about this debate — that it’s more important for Biden — is wrong. A June 14-17 Fox News poll shows why: It gives Biden a two-point lead, but he is up by five points among the three-quarters of voters who say it matters “a great deal” to them who wins (they are more likely to vote) and by 11 points among the “double haters” who have an unfavorable view of both candidates.
Trump needs to energize more voters, constrain himself to look reasonable, hide his love of conspiracy theories and not make the debate about himself. Count me as skeptical that he can pull this off.
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