How tonight’s debate will break the mold
The stakes of the first Trump-Biden showdown
Debate day is here! I’ll be experimenting with something fun tonight: throughout the debate, I’ll be live chatting with paid subscribers. Think of it as a giant group chat for the WUTP community to discuss the debate as it’s going on. I’ll be in the chat all night, sharing my insights and answering your questions.
Click here to upgrade to be a paid subscriber. I’ll send an email reminder tonight, but you can access the chat here.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been circling each other for more than four years now, essentially engaged in a non-stop campaign for the presidency across two different cycles.
Yet, in that time, they have rarely been in the same room. A mix of Covid and partisan bitterness largely kept the two rivals away from each other during their last campaign, with traditional niceties like the Al Smith Dinner going virtual, while others (like attending your successor’s inauguration) fell to the polarized wayside.
Their high-stakes run-in tonight in Atlanta will be the first time Trump and Biden have laid eyes on each other since their last debate, in October 2020. It will be fascinating to watch as four years of pent-up anger, insults, and frustration — and hopefully some policy disputes as well — pour out in 90 minutes of highly anticipated television.
Presidential debates are one of our most familiar democratic rituals, and yet tonight’s showdown will look (and feel) different for several reasons. Before we get into tonight’s stakes, let’s take a moment to review all the ways the debate will break with precedent:
Two presidents will be debating each other. Presidents have run against each other for the White House before (most recently Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison in 1892), but never in the era of televised debates. We have grown accustomed to seeing former presidents ride off into the sunset, building houses or taking up painting. It will be something new to watch one debate their successor in primetime.
It’s really early. As I noted last week, no presidential debate has ever taken place earlier than late September. It’s late June, so we’re doing this a full three months early. The early debate ensures that the two candidates — both of whom are, at best, inconsistent speakers and debaters — have plenty of time in the cycle to recover if they falter tonight.
Both candidates will be rusty. Usually, the first debate of a cycle goes poorly for the incumbent president, largely because they’ve gone four years without debating — or, really, without being questioned to their face — while their challenger has gone through the ringer of a slog of primary debates. This year, neither candidate participated in primary debates, since Trump opted out of the GOP events. That could throw the unprepared-incumbent-paradigm out the window.
No independent commission is involved. Except for the first Kennedy-Nixon match-ups in 1960, U.S. presidential debates have always had an independent organizer, either the League of Women Voters (from 1976 to 1984) or the Commission on Presidential Debates (since 1988). But both parties ditched the CPD this year, allowing the debate sponsor (CNN) to organize everything. That means, “In This Debate, CNN Is the Decider,” as a New York Times headline recently announced. “For the first time in decades, a single television network will have sole discretion over the look, feel and cadence of a general-election presidential debate,” the Times added. Expect plenty of red CNN logos flashing at you from across the screen.
The mics will be muted and the studio will be empty. Without an independent commission in the way, the two campaigns were able to negotiate tonight’s rules directly through CNN. Those talks yielded two big changes: the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to speak (for the first time ever, in a bid to avoid the interruption-fest of their first debate in 2020) and the debate will be held in a TV studio without any live audience (for the first time since 1960). For a format that has barely been modified since the 1970s, these are two important shifts.
Oh, and there’s one more way this debate might be different than most previous debates: It could actually matter.
The general Pundit Thinking on debates is that they sometimes yield big moments (“There you go again”; “You’re no Jack Kennedy”), but rarely make much of an impact on the presidential race.
Then again, we’ve also never had a debate featuring an 81-year-old candidate or a 34-time convicted felon. As the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer and Marianne LeVine recently put it, hardened caricatures of these two candidates have been circulated for years by their opposing media bubbles. This will be the rare opportunity for all Americans to see them, unedited and unfiltered by partisan actors, and for the two sides to dispel the major worries that have haunted their campaigns.
For Biden, it’s a chance to ward off concerns about his age, to prove that he has one last campaign left in him. For Trump, it’s an opportunity to convince Americans that he isn’t as extreme as advertised, that they can trust him at the helm despite January 6th and his felony convictions.
With tens of millions of viewers expected to be watching, the debate is also one of the campaigns’ few chances to jolt a race that has been incredibly close and, so far, incredibly consistent. Take a look at the FiveThirtyEight polling average, which currently sits at Trump +0.1% and has only moved a few tenths of a percentage point in either direction for months now. With two widely known, widely disliked candidates, perhaps nothing can really move that trendline — but, if anything could, it would be tonight’s debate.
Usually presidential candidates want as much airtime as they can get, but both candidates’ strategies this time are framed around emphasizing the other guy’s unpopularity. That means the best thing, in all likelihood, the best thing either Trump or Biden can do tonight is sit back and hope their rival talks themselves into an implosion. (In this way, the muted microphones is a boon to both.)
In between, they will both try to goad each other: Trump about Biden’s age and his son Hunter, Biden about Trump’s convictions and his more extreme rhetoric. Trump will try to get Biden to answer for the border and his economy; Biden will seek to pin down Trump on issues like abortion and potential pardons for January 6th rioters.
They both want the debate, and the race, to be a referendum on their opponent. If Biden is the candidate best remembered from this debate, that probably means it will have been a victory for Trump — and vice versa.
Then there are all sort of X-factors, like whether Trump will try to interrupt Biden despite the microphone rule (here’s what that would look and sound like) or whether Biden will make a major verbal miscue (or even have a physical stumble). We’ll also see how often the moderators decide to step in: amid a barrage of attacks from the Trump side, CNN has said the moderators will largely refrain from live fact-checking during the debate (hello, Candy Crowley!).
Tonight’s debate will be a fascinating match-up between two men who plainly hate each other — and whom many American disdain as well. Whichever candidate comes off best to these double-haters tonight (or, perhaps, whoever doesn’t come off the worst) could manage to claim an advantage in a consequential, but difficult-to-disrupt, campaign.
The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time and last for 90 minutes. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate. The debate will air on CNN and be simulcast on a variety of other networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. You can also stream it on HBO Max or watch here on YouTube.
In case you can’t watch, I’ll have a full rundown of the debate in tomorrow’s newsletter. And, of course, I hope you’ll join me in the WUTP Live Chat here if you’re a paid subscriber.
Happy watching!
More news to know.
WaPo: Trump allies test a new strategy for blocking election results
Politico: Biden quietly had his biggest online fundraising day after Trump was convicted
Daybook.
White House: President Biden will depart Camp David for Atlanta at 12 p.m. ET, before participating in tonight’s debate at 9 p.m. ET.
Vice President Harris will deliver remarks at a virtual campaign event tonight.
Congress: The Senate is on recess. The House will vote on the State Department appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2025, and begin work on the Defense Department appropriations measure.
Supreme Court: The justices will release opinions — and maybe accidental opinions — at 10 a.m. ET. Will they rule on President Trump’s immunity from prosecution the day of the debate? We’ll see!e
“This will be the rare opportunity for all Americans to see them, unedited and unfiltered by partisan actors,”
CNN is the partisan actor. One moderator was the wife of one of the 51 that lied about the Hunter laptop being Russian disinformation and the other referred to Trump as a Nazi. Watch the tenor and approach of questions tonight with a critical eye.
Love what u r doing. Sandi shapiro