Points win in Nashville moves Biden closer to the Oval Office

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden is a step closer to the White House after emerging unscathed from the final presidential debate with Donald Trump less than two weeks before the election.

The only relevant measure of who won or lost this debate is how it impacts the final frenetic stages of this campaign.

On that measure Biden is a clear winner. He was calm and considered, with only the odd ‘senior’ moment, as he rebuffed with surprising effectiveness Trump’s attacks on his family’s business dealings.

Trump had clearly decided that his best chance of a game-changing moment in this campaign was to question Biden’s alleged business involvement with his son Hunter in Ukraine and China.

This is a murky but still unfolding story which has been largely ignored by the liberal US media and obsessed over by the conservative US media.

But Trump’s push to focus on claims that the Biden family was making money in Ukraine and China while he was vice president were far too vague to cut through to ordinary voters.

Indeed, Biden had a solid retort by pointing out that the president was demanding information about Biden’s finances when Trump refuses to release his own tax records.

While Trump failed to land these blows, Biden hit the president with deadly precision on his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden made the simple but powerful claim that any president who presided over the deaths of more than 220,000 Americans had forfeited the right to be president.

Biden also scored hits on the president over his truly absurd claim that America is ‘turning the corner’ on the virus when infections have now spiked up to more than 65,000 a day from 35,000 just over a month ago. When Trump said Americans are “learning to live with it”, Biden retorted that “people are learning to die with it”.

Despite this, Trump was more composed and therefore more effective than he was compared to his bully-like behaviour in the first debate.

But he appeared to be less well prepared than Biden and performed particularly poorly on the key issue of healthcare. Biden skewered the central hole in Trump’s healthcare argument that he wants to scrap Obamacare but has not released any policy that would replace it, including for the key issue of covering pre-existing conditions.

This gaping policy hole in Trump’s platform – in the middle of a pandemic – was exploited by Biden in front of a massive national audience.

To be fair, the structured format of the debate – with six specific key themes – made it hard for Trump to make some of his key attacks on Biden which form part of his rally speeches.

For example, Trump was unable to question Biden on the issue of packing the Supreme Court. But more disappointing for the president was that he was not able to make his central allegation that Biden is a puppet of the left wing of his party which advocates a socialist agenda.

The topics suited Biden more than they did Trump and while Trump performed as well as could be expected, Biden had the best lines and had the best hits throughout the night.

With just under two weeks to go in the campaign, Biden leads Trump nationally by 7.9 points – a large but not insurmountable lead.

But this debate was a lost opportunity by Trump at a time when he is running out of opportunities.

Biden, despite his obvious ageing, has proved a more formidable debate opponent than Trump expected given the president’s portrayal of his opponent as semi-senile.

Trump needed a game changer in this debate. He didn’t get it.

(Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia)