Long awaited first BidenTrump debate is here. But will it change any voters’ minds?
Polling average shows just 7% of likely voters are undecided
When Donald Trump and Joe Biden walk on stage Tuesday night at Case Western University in Cleveland, they won’t be expecting to change anyone’s mind in the first of three nationally televised presidential debates.
That’s because with only five weeks left before election day Nov. 3, there aren’t that many people who haven’t decided how they’ll vote.
“It used to be that people didn’t focus on the election until after Labor Day, and the debates were designed to help people come to a decision,” said Joe Tuman, a political communications professor at San Francisco State University. “But these days, the vast majority of likely voters made up their minds long ago.”
The RealClearPolitics national polling average shows that only about 7% of likely voters remain undecided. In California, the number was 5% in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey released last week.
But in a year when the coronavirus has disrupted the traditional handshaking, babykissing, barnstorming model of retail politics, Tuesday’s debate provides one of the few remaining national political events. It’s a rare chance for people to see the president and his Democratic challenger forced to answer pointed questions from a neutral moderator. Except when they don’t. “The first debate usually has the biggest audience and the biggest impact,” said Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. But “usually in the debates, (candidates) tend to ignore the questions to give a stump speech.”
Trump, however, could be forced to go beyond his tweets and the red meat comments he makes to crowds at his rallies if he’s asked about a New York Times investigation that looked at 18 years of his tax returns and found that, because of deductions and business losses, he paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and zero taxes in 11 other years.
While the president dismissed the story as “fake news,” Biden can be expected to point out that many bluecollar workers pay far more taxes on their much smaller incomes.
The debate will last for 90 minutes, with Chris Wallace of Fox News serving as moderator. He will question Trump and Biden for 15 minutes on each of six topics: their records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, race and violence in cities, and the integrity of the election.
“It’s not really a debate, which typically has a lot of interaction,” said Tuman, a former debate coach. “It’s more like dueling press conferences.”
Each topic is a potential minefield, with candidates who will see the questions in very different lights.
On the economy, for example, expect Trump to boast about the first three years of his term, when unemployment was dropping, business was humming and wages were rising.
“In a new term as president, we will again build the greatest economy in history, quickly returning to full employment, soaring incomes and record prosperity,” Trump said as he accepted the GOP nomination in August.
Biden is likely to talk about a current economy ravaged by the coronavirus, with unemployment in several states in double digits, businesses shut down across the country and people losing hope that things will get better.
“Talk to a lot of real working people,” Biden said in a speech this month. “Ask them, do they feel like they’re being left behind? Ask them how they feel about the economy coming back.”
Trump is likely to be on the defensive when he’s questioned about the country’s response to the pandemic. While he continues to say, without scientific evidence, that the coronavirus will soon disappear and that the country will manufacture 100 million doses of an asyet unknown vaccine by the end of the year, the death toll and number of cases keep rising.
“Biden has been very disciplined,” Tuman said. “Every time he opens his mouth, he repeats the phrase, ‘200,000 American dead,’ and that’s all on Trump’s watch.”
The president will also be called to defend his refusal to say if he will accept the results of the election. Without providing evidence, Trump has argued for months that Democrats will use mail ballots to steal the election and told reporters last week, “We’re going to have to see what happens,” when asked if he would guarantee a peaceful transition of power.
Biden and other Democrats reacted angrily, and even Republicans tried to play down Trump’s remarks.
But it’s the question of race and violence that could provoke the greatest fireworks. While Biden has supported the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, Trump has characterized the demonstrations, and the violence that has sometimes accompanied them, as a lawandorder issue that can be resolved only by getting tough on the protesters and bringing in more police, federal law enforcement agents or even the National Guard and the military.
Down by an average of nearly seven percentage points in national polls and trailing in such battleground states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, the president needs the debate to turn the race around. That’s hard to do as an incumbent, said Citrin of UC Berkeley.
For Biden, a draw is probably good enough.
“The (debate) structure helps the challenger,” Citrin said. “He or she is treated as the equal of the incumbent ... (and) has a chance to show themselves as presidential and up to the task.”
By contrast, the president’s goal will be to find a way to show that Biden isn’t up to the task.
“Biden wants to be a calm yet informed presence, competent and empathetic, but not radical,” Citrin said. Trump will “try to portray Biden as a blast from the failed past, but also a puppet of the left.”
Trump has never shied away from personal attacks, characterizing Biden as “Sleepy Joe” and suggesting that the former vice president no longer has the mental acuity to handle the nation’s top job.
It’s an attack that could come back to haunt the president at the debate, said Tuman of San Francisco State.
“Trump has made the bar so low that all Biden has to do is show up and have a pulse,” he said.
Each candidate faces potential stumbling blocks. Biden has never been a great speaker. He regularly stumbles over words and facts, goes off on tangents as he tries to make a point, and has a temper that can show up when he or his family is attacked.
For his part, Trump prefers to wing it, even for something as important as Tuesday’s debate. He reportedly has done no mock debates and only a limited amount of formal preparation.
But while Trump prides himself on his spontaneity and his willingness to quickly hit back against any attacks, it can also lead to factfree comments that Biden and the debate’s moderator can focus on.
About the only guarantee is that whatever happens Tuesday night, both Trump and Biden will come out declaring victory.
It doesn’t always work that way, Tuman said.
“Debates are not always won,” he said. “But they can be lost.”