Joe Biden’s campaign was prepared to come out swinging after fiery debate against Donald Trump.
A bombastic Trump lashed out at his successor, calling him a failure on the economy and the world stage. Biden looked to hit back, but his delivery was faltering as he spoke rapidly in a raspy, trailing-off voice, stumbled on his words and stared open-mouthed.
His performance, after he spent the week secluded in preparation, sparked new concern within his Democratic Party as polls show Trump is tied or ahead for the November election.
According to NPR, here are four takeaways from the first Biden-Trump debate of this campaign:
1. First and foremost, let’s talk about the elephant in the room – Democrats have to be wondering if they’d be better off with someone else as their nominee.
Neither candidate is the official nominee yet. The national political conventions haven’t happened — but it’s next to impossible that Democrats would replace Biden.
Still, given he delivered the kind of performance Democrats feared, party leaders, strategists and many voters, frankly, had to be wondering during this debate what it would be like if any of a handful of other Democrats were standing on that stage.
Biden got a bit stronger as the debate went on, especially on foreign policy. He had some one-liners, like calling Trump a “whiner” when Trump wouldn’t definitively say that he would accept the results of the 2024 election. But Biden often wasn’t able to show vigor or consistently convey what he wanted to say. He simply couldn’t deliver the kinds of happy-warrior blows with that toothy smile audiences have seen from Biden in years past.
“Sometimes the spin don’t spin,” one Democratic strategist texted midway through the debate when asked for reaction.
2. If how Biden sounded wasn’t bad enough, the visuals might have been equally as bad.
An important rule of thumb for candidates — and moderators — in debates is to be conscious of how things look, of how you look, of what people are seeing at home. And what people saw — and this was predictable — was a split screen.
Biden wasn’t able to use that to his advantage at all, even as Trump doled out falsehood after falsehood. Instead, he looked genuinely shocked and confused, which is never a good look.
Trump and his base might not care about Saturday Night Live, but Biden’s base does. And this week’s cold open won’t be pretty.
3. The format — and hands-off moderators — benefited Trump.
The muting of the candidates was likely intended to make the debate calmer and not allow Trump to run roughshod over the moderators or his opponent. But it had the effect of making Trump seem more sedate than usual.
Trump employed rounds of verbal jujitsu, in which he threw back his own vulnerabilities and directed them toward Biden. He was even able at one point, during a strange exchange about golf handicaps, to say, “Let’s not act like children.”
The moderation, or lack thereof, also allowed Trump to spread falsehoods and hyperbole without being interrupted or corrected. CNN indicated before the debate that the moderators were not going to play a strong role in fact checking the candidates, and they lived up to that.
They left it to the candidates, essentially, and with Biden unable to deliver in real time and the moderators declining to, the audience was left with a salad bowl full of rotten eggs and moldy lettuce that passed for facts.
4. This debate might not move the needle much, if at all.
Despite Biden’s struggles, which will understandably get the headlines, Trump had some difficult moments, too, especially in the second half of the debate.
In addition to spreading myriad falsehoods, he did little to credibly defend his conduct on and before the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol; he used the kind of hyperbolic and vituperative language that has long turned off swing voters; and showed why many are concerned about some of his positions on the issues, especially on abortion and how the U.S. should be represented on the world stage.
So despite Biden’s shortcomings, millions will still likely vote for Biden, anyway, because he’s not Trump.
The bottom line is: Americans have said they are unhappy with their choices, and, in this – the biggest moment of the 2024 presidential campaign yet — it was clear why.