With several months to go, there are many big events that can still shape this election. Two obvious ones are the Vice-Presidential debate and the second Trump-Biden debate in September. If Biden does well in September, this debate will be forgotten - Image Politico
Biden’s Debate Debacle
By Nayyer Ali MD
Last week President Biden met Donald Trump in the first of two debates they have agreed to. It went rather badly for Biden, with both the optics of his presentation, and the strength of his responses lagging badly. Most observers consider Trump to have won the debate handily, and questions have been raised about Biden’s fitness to even continue to run for reelection. Many left-leaning pundits and even the New York Times have called for Biden to drop out of the race and allow the Democrats to put forward a younger alternative.
Biden’s team agreed to this debate thinking it would focus voters’ attention on the fact that Trump is actually running for the White House again. While those who are very politically engaged tell pollsters they prefer Biden over Trump, there are millions of voters who have not bothered to even consider this impending election, and they tell pollsters they are more likely to support Trump.
The problem with debating Trump is that he is a bully and a blowhard who will talk over his opponent and brazenly lie while playing to the crowd for support. Biden’s team tried to neutralize these factors by asking for a series of concessions. First, there would be no audience. Second, the person who is not supposed to be responding to the question would have his microphone turned off, so there would be no interruption. Finally, the debate would be hosted by the neutral CNN, with the hope that the moderators would push back on obvious falsehoods.
It turned out that the moderators did no such thing. Trump basically lied throughout the debate, doing what is called the “Gish Gallop”. The Gish Gallop is a debating technique used by Duane Gish, an evangelical Christian who used to debate scientists and dispute the validity of evolution. He would routinely make a whole series of totally false claims that would simply overwhelm his opponent in nonsense. Most scientists did not know how to respond to this quantity of nonsense, as it can take several minutes to rebut a single false statement. With his “Gish Gallop” Duane Gish would often come off better than his opponents, despite advocating total nonsense. Trump did the same thing, and Biden did not have a good strategy to handle it when the moderators chose not to set the record straight.
After the debate, there was great consternation among Democrats. Was Biden really just too old and feeble to carry this election forward to victory? Is there any path to an alternative? Would swing voters accept a Black woman (Vice President Kamala Harris) or would racism and misogyny cost Harris the election? If Biden dropped out, could a new consensus candidate be found and could he or she raise enough money to beat Trump?
There seem to be two Bidens. At his best, such as the State of the Union address he gave earlier this year, he comes off strong and in charge. But at other times his voice is subdued and his sentences short. Biden does have a stutter, which is something he has lived with his whole life. He has developed techniques to hide the stutter, which work so well that many voters are surprised to learn he suffers from this speech impediment. When he was younger, he was a great debater and defeated both Sarah Palin in 2008 and Paul Ryan in 2012 in the Vice-Presidential debates.
Biden’s campaign team had a zoom call with its 500 or so biggest supporters on July 1. There they made the case that the election remains close and that polls so far do not show much movement either way. They expressed confidence that they were going to win this election. They also conceded that Biden had a bad debate but made the point that Trump too had a bad debate. Swing voters watching the debate consistently disliked his responses.
Biden is not dropping out of the race. In a few weeks, most voters will forget the details of this debate. The vast majority of voters are locked in to either Trump or Biden, and swing voters are still not really paying much attention. With several months to go, there are many big events that can still shape this election. Two obvious ones are the Vice-Presidential debate and the second Trump-Biden debate to be held in September. If Biden does well in September, this debate will be forgotten.
Trump also has gotten a huge boost from the Supreme Court, which granted immunity to Presidents for “official acts”. This has caused Judge Merchan in New York to delay Trump’s sentencing for his recent guilty verdicts in New York State from July 11 to September. If Trump gets sentenced to prison time in September, that will also obviously be a huge disruptor to his campaign.
