Biden Can’t Blow the Debates
They may be his only chances to change people’s minds.
ONE WORRY WAS LAID TO REST last week—that President Biden was in denial about the state of the race. He’d been saying for some time that the polls were wrong. Axios reported that this view was common in the Biden camp. “The dismissiveness of the poor polling is sincere, not public spin, according to Democrats who have spoken privately with the president and his team.”
This was disturbing for a couple of reasons, the first being that, if anything, the polls have underpredicted, not overpredicted, Trump’s support. That was true in 2016 and 2020. This year, it’s not just one or two outlier polls. The polling aggregate over the past several months has shown an incredibly tight race with Trump narrowly in the lead. Yes, it’s still early, and plenty can change when inattentive voters start to focus around Labor Day, but it’s folly to pretend that the polls don’t tell us anything useful. The second reason it’s disturbing is that considering the stakes of this election, no degree of complacency is tolerable. Biden’s implied message of “Relax, nothing to see here” was alarming.
It was a relief therefore, when, after the New York Times/Siena poll dropped showing Trump ahead in five swing states, Biden stepped up and challenged Trump to two debates—a sign that he recognized the need to shake things up.
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Debates with a “f— moron” (to quote a former secretary of state under Trump) are not ideal, but there aren’t a lot of good choices at the moment. Our fate as a country depends on getting the attention of voters who would rather not think about politics. Debates, as stupid and dismaying as they have become, may be the best vehicle to secure their eyeballs. Those inattentive voters are not necessarily bad people, but they’ve arguably acquired some misconceptions: A Navigator poll released this month found that a quarter of the electorate thinks Biden, not Trump, was responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned.
Trump and his allies have way oversold the Biden-is-senile message. A fair share of voters have come to think that he is not just old, but drooling and unable to function. The truth is that, though his voice is getting croaky, he messes up words and names sometimes, and he walks quite stiffly, he is very much compos mentis. He has demonstrated this again and again—as when he traveled to Kyiv, or to Jerusalem, or when he delivered his State of the Union message complete with unscripted moments. Biden was so sharp at the SOTU that Trump accused him of being drugged. Most voters did not see those in real time, but instead saw curated clips with all the attendant problems of biased editing. Only 32 million people watched the SOTU, and only 24 percent of them were ages 18-54. A live debate will be a crucible.
This is not to suggest that all Biden needs to do is stay vertical for 90 minutes. If Biden has a serious brain freeze or incoherent digression, he and we are in terrible trouble. If the same happens to Trump, the consequences for him would likely be less dire because his cult is fanatical, though it would remind undecided voters that Trump is only three years younger than Biden—and it is Trump who had a parent with Alzheimer’s disease.
This rare moment of voters’ attention cannot be squandered. An April Pew survey found that 42 percent of voters overall rated Trump as a good or great president, while 11 percent said he was average. By contrast, only 28 percent said Biden was good or great, with 21 percent rating him as average. The debates are chances to remind viewers of how disastrous Trump’s first term was and to warn them about his threats to “terminate” the Constitution in a second. It’s a chance to show the sort of dangerous and criminal associates Trump has surrounded himself with, from Michael Flynn to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes to Stephen Miller to Jeffrey Clark to Richard Grenell.
In the first debate in 2020, Trump attempted a psyop on Biden. He planned to be so provocative and bullying that Biden would be reduced to stuttering. (He may also have been trying to infect Biden with COVID.) It backfired. Now Biden has his own psyop opportunity—to remind voters that Trump has promised to pardon all the January 6th defendants, and to remind Trump and the country of all the former Trump hires who’ve said he is unfit. This will make Trump angry and vengeful. He’ll probably say things that reveal his pathological vanity. He’ll say they are “overrated” or losers or part of the deep state—to which the obvious retort is “Really? You seem to hire a lot of incompetent people!” Or, “You hired 44 cabinet members in four years and only four are supporting you.” Biden needs to inform voters about something important—Trump’s own people call him dangerous to the nation.
Above all, Biden needs to have some better responses ready for the inevitable questions about the state of the economy and immigration. His interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett contained some good moments, but his response on inflation was terrible. Instead of acknowledging what people are experiencing at the supermarket and in their monthly rent or mortgage payments, Biden argued against the facts. He denied that the economy is a problem, suggesting that while Americans may say the economy is poor, “they’re personally in good shape.” This isn’t true. According to CNN, 53 percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with their personal financial situation. Pressed on the matter of inflation, Biden at first claimed, falsely, that inflation was “9 percent” when he entered office. In fact, it was 1.4 percent when he was inaugurated. And then he resorted to the “greedy capitalists” canard. The problem, the president claimed, citing the size of Snickers bars, is shrinkflation. “It’s like 20 percent less for the same price. That’s corporate greed. That’s corporate greed. And we have got to deal with it. And that’s what I’m working on.” He has hit this theme previously, declaring in February that there are “still too many corporations in America ripping people off. Price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation.”
Corporations are no more greedy than they were before the pandemic. Besides, if the problem were greed, how is another Biden term going to eliminate one of the seven deadly sins? This argument should be retired. Biden needs to acknowledge how tough inflation has been, and then tell a story about supply chains, stimulus (yes, even admitting that both the Trump and Biden administrations pumped money into the economy—because it seemed necessary to avert an even worse outcome), and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He needs to show how much progress we have made since 2022, when inflation really did reach 9 percent. He should boast that we’ve reduced it to 3.4 percent without triggering a recession—which few believed would be possible (even if credit goes to the Federal Reserve, not the president, but what the hell—he’s getting the blame, so he might as well). He can brag about the direction of inflation and point out, justly, that Trump’s proposed high taxes (i.e. tariffs) would take money from taxpayers’ pockets and make inflation spike beyond anything we’ve seen in the past three years.
Biden also needs to have a better answer on immigration. Pointing to the GOP’s cynical torpedoing of the immigration bill is one talking point. But he needs more. Even if it’s too late to convince voters that he sees the problem through the same lens they do, he can at least convey through word and deed that he is open to stricter policies.
The majority of the American people have never liked Trump. Biden has given himself two opportunities to convince them that granting Trump another term, however tepid their feelings about the incumbent, would be a disaster.