Six 2024 Presidential Debate Thoughts

Biden and Trump on CNN! Me and my whiskey in my living room watching it!

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Tonight’s presidential debate was unusual in a variety of ways. It was the first debate to feature two one-term presidents seeking their second term. It was the earliest general election debate in the televised era. That means that the cake is far from baked when it comes to November¹ and this debate has the potential to really matter. This is particularly true given the likely audience for the debate. Furthermore, for many voters, this could be the first time they pay attention to the 2024 race.

Going into the debate, my expectation was that Biden would have the upper hand. The audience-less format hurts Trump badly, who thrives if he can rabble-rouse. It is also worth remembering that Trump had lost every debate he has had with a Democrat. The GOP line of “Biden is a senile, enfeebled codger who needs to be juiced to stay up for a debate” is contradictory at best.

Finally, it is worth remembering that most Americans — including most voters — have likely not heard Joe Biden’s voice in the last calendar year. Most Americans tune out politics, which means often the only Biden coverage they get exposed to is a mute television in a bar or restaurant showing Biden doing or saying something. And in my experience when you see Biden without hearing him, he looks particularly old. The debate is an opportunity to puncture the tuned-out voter — if not tonight, then in the TikTok clips the debate produces.

So those were my expectations going in, and they were pretty much shattered in the first ten minutes. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World watched the entire debate, and offers up the following brutal thoughts.

1. There is no easy way to sugarcoat this: this debate started out horribly for Biden. He looked old. He sounded hoarse and enfeebled. For the first twenty-five minutes of the debate, he was borderline incoherent. He did not finish some of his thoughts, other answers trailed off, he got cut off a few times, and some responses were so inside baseball that I doubt a lay person would have understood them. I honestly wondered if he had Covid or some other disease. Trump gave Biden multiple openings in some of his initial answers for effective rebuttals — pointing out how the Trump crime wave had now dissipated, for example — and he whiffed on every opportunity. His first half-hour of this debate was catastrophic.

2. Furthermore, Biden’s performance leaned into every stereotype that the mainstream media has highlighted: his age, his coherence, whether his staff was keeping him from the public, and the general question of whether he was up to the job. Upset that Ezra Klein or Nate Silver raised the question of Biden’s age? Well, after tonight, they have a pretty valid point! This will now be discussed for the next few media cycles at least.

3. Trump lied constantly — constantly. His answer on the environment was the least coherent assemblage of words I have ever heard. The thing is, Trump lied very smoothly at first and it took a while for Biden to gain any sense of equilibrium and call him out on anything. Interestingly, Trump’s coherence eroded badly after the first few questions. When he wasn’t lying, Trump too talked mostly inside baseball and I doubt many lay people understood what he was saying.

4. While Trump won the first thirty minutes of the debate by default, he devolved as the debate wore on. Biden also finally started counterpunching, responding to Trump’s BS with observations like “everything he says is a lie.” But if first impressions matter, then Biden made a horrible one.

5. I am aware that foreign policy questions were discussed at this debate but I conveniently blacked out when they were discussed.² That might have been due to self-preservation. Anyone looking for substance in any of the responses to the debate questions would not have found much. I lost count of the number of times Dana Bash or Jake Tapper told either of candidate that they had time left because their answers were too brief. There was a moment at the end of the debate when Biden and Trump argued about golf, and they seemed more passionate about that question than, say, cutting the deficit. I have been watching presidential debates since the 1980s. On substance, this was the single-worst debate I have ever seen.

6. Will any of this affect the subsequent polling or the election outcome? That is hard to say. It is never clear whether voters react to what they see in the debate, what the media says they should see about the debate, or some combination of both. Nate Silver is right when he writes, “The trickle-down effect between how the New York Times frames a certain headline and what some politically disengaged swing voter in Latrobe, Pennsylvania thinks about Biden is unclear at best.” Because Biden’s performance reinforced the prevailing media narrative about him, I do fear that rather than resetting the terms of the race, this debate reinforced them. But I have been wrong on this before, and I may well be wrong about it again.

1. It should be noted that neither the latest NYT/Siena poll nor Nate Silver’s election forecast offers much good news for Biden. But the Times acknowledged something of a partisan response bias and Silver acknowledged that it’s still rather early in the race.

2. I am aware that both their answers on trade were absolutely abysmal.