Donald Trump is a bad-mannered, bullying bulldozer and in the first presidential debate he behaved according to type. But people know that about him already. Joe Biden, in contrast, looked like a weak candidate trying unsuccessfully to be macho.
Although this judgment may put me in an extreme minority, I think Trump made some solid progress towards hurting Biden and therefore increasing Trump’s chances of re-election.
Trump was by far the more forceful presence on stage. Both men interrupted each other. Trump started it and did it a bit more. The ruder insults actually came from Biden, who called Trump, variously, a racist and a clown and told him to shut up.
I was reminded of the Republican primary debates. Naturally civil Republicans such as Marco Rubio would try to mix up the insults with Trump. It never worked. Rubio diminished his core appeal — civility and mainstream political solutions — without seriously competing with Trump over who was tougher or nastier.
This debate was unedifying. It was raucous, shouty, noisy, at times incoherent. Moderator Chris Wallace did a poor job because on those rare occasions when he did get the candidates to stop interrupting each other, he then interrupted them himself if their answers weren’t to his liking.
This is a poor show from US politics. It certainly was nothing like the great debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas over slavery, or even at the level of Richard Nixon and John Kennedy providing detailed assessments of China’s actions towards Taiwan. But it is what it is.
The question is whether the debate moves any votes.
Working out the winner in a presidential debate is complex, especially these days. Mitt Romney was widely thought to have trounced Barack Obama in their first debate in 2012, as Walter Mondale was thought to have done in the first debate against Ronald Reagan in 1984. But Romney and Mondale both lost their elections.
More pertinently, Hillary Clinton was declared the clear winner against Trump four years ago, yet she lost the election.
More particularly she lost every state that was closely contested and fiercely fought.
So it would be a fair inference that tens of millions of Californians thought Clinton won the debate and this had zero effect on the election outcome because she was always going to win California. But perhaps 200,000 mid-westerners who previously weren’t going to vote for Trump, maybe weren’t going to vote at all, concluded he would be more likely to do things that benefited them than she would and voted accordingly.
In this election maybe 500,000 or a million people scattered across the mid-west battleground states will finally decide the outcome. Early polls indicate a plurality, though not by an overwhelming margin, think Biden won the debate.
But that might be true nationally, yet perhaps Trump has made progress where it counts, among that million or so crucial mid-western voters.
Trump needs more of the debate to be about Biden. George W. Bush made John Kerry seem an unappealing, even dangerous, alternative in 2004, and Obama did the same to Romney in 2012.
In truth Biden is a very vulnerable candidate. The peculiarities of the campaign, especially the pandemic restrictions, plus the fact most of the media aches for Trump to lose, and paradoxically the fact Trump sucks up all the oxygen in any given environment, have all combined to put Biden in a protective bubble. The debate pierced Biden’s bubble. I think Trump did make some progress with those mid-west voters.
Of course Trump always overdoes everything. He is always fortissimo, ultra, ultra, fortissimo, never pianissimo. He would be more effective if he reduced the volume by about 25 per cent, which still would make him the loudest, brashest candidate in modern American politics.
But he did seed doubt about Biden across a number of fields. Trump attacked the Democrats’ Green New Deal. Biden responded by defending the Green New Deal. “Over time, the Green New Deal pays for itself,” he began, “because new plants …”
But then Wallace jumped in to save Biden, asking him, incredulously, if he was in favour of the Green New Deal after all. No I’m not, Biden said.
So that was as clear as mud. Wallace and Trump, both interjecting, saved that Biden sentence from becoming the spectacular train wreck that so many of his unscripted sentences so often become. Nonetheless, that exchange could hurt Biden in two contradictory ways. It convinces younger, more radical voters that Biden’s heart really isn’t in their radicalism. Yet it also worries pragmatic mid-westerners about what the real economic cost will be of whatever Biden does plan to do on green issues.
Trump hurt Biden a bit on law and order. Every law enforcement body, Trump said, by which he meant police unions, is backing me. No, Biden said, some are backing me. Name one, Trump challenged. Name a single law enforcement group that is backing your candidacy.
Biden stuttered and stumbled, seemed to have not a clue what to say. But as Wallace and Trump both kept talking he was once more effectively shielded from his own limitations.
Trump pushed Biden to the right, forcing him to say that US police forces should not be de-funded but actually need more money. Biden in his joint statement with Bernie Sanders previously had said policing needed to be “re-imagined”. No one has the faintest idea what this means.
Biden and the Democrats look as though they may possibly have the wit to avoid the trap Trump has set them with his inspired nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Biden spoke respectfully of Barrett, as he should. If Senate Democrats demonise her in the way they did with Brett Kavanaugh it is a huge vote loser for them. Trump’s decision to stick with Kavanaugh was one of the high points of his presidency. A weaker president would have quietly had Kavanaugh withdraw after the uncorroborated allegations were made against him. That would have been a wicked capitulation to guilt by accusation.
Trump was rough to bring up Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his Chinese and Russian deals. But they are surely as legitimate a subject as Trump’s taxes.
Trump was unattractive personally. But Americans know his personality already. If Trump is to win on November 3 he needs enough voters in critical states to have in their minds a question mark about Biden. I think he got a bit closer to that in this debate.
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