Even in Wisconsin’s liberal stronghold of the capital city of Madison, President Joe Biden‘s debate appearance with former president Donald Trump left-wing voters on a waiting list complained about their choice in the elections.
Biden’s voice was hoarse and hoarse from the start Thursday night. He stumbled over words and had to correct himself with numbers. Sometimes he was hard to follow. At one point, the president seemed to lose the thread and ended, confusingly, with the phrase, “we finally defeated Medicare.”
Noah Anders, 24, grimaced when asked what he thought of the debate.
“It was a painful experience to go through. Neither candidate inspires our country,” Anders said. The Madison resident who will soon attend law school at the University of Wisconsin said the debate left him concerned about Biden’s cognitive abilities, but he also has doubts about Trump’s mental capacity.
“To be president you have to deal with a lot of difficult issues, and I don’t know if they can handle the nuances and difficulties of the job,” he said. “Good luck, America.”
Timothy Sanders, 48, said he remains optimistic about Biden despite the president’s mixed performance, but acknowledged the president has not sounded so clear at a time when the election outlook could matter.
“I’m not worried about his age at all. If you had a grandpa who took you fishing and stuttered, you would still trust him,” he said. “You wouldn’t engage him in a debate on live television if you could avoid it, because that’s entertainment. That’s not fair.”
Sanders promised to campaign for Biden because he does not want Trump to be re-elected.
“I think we are in a very dangerous place,” he said.
The remarks came in what should have been a friendly venue for the Democratic president. The debate was hosted at The Barrymore Theater by The Devil’s Advocate Radio in Madison and The Progressive magazine, a political publication in the same city. Several hundred attendees wore Biden Harris shirts and enthusiastically bought popcorn and beer.
Then the television debate began.
“I hate having to pick one,” said Jesse Clingan, 42, a construction worker from Milwaukee.
“It’s kind of choosing the worse of two evils,” Clingan said. “But ultimately I would rather have (Biden) on his worst day than Trump.”
Heidi Robertson, 48, a job coach in Madison, said she noticed Biden was a bit “awkward” and it felt “embarrassing” but that what he said was good.
“He’s going too fast. He has to slow down to get all his thoughts out,” she said.
The debate could exacerbate a major problem facing Biden’s campaign in the key swing state of Wisconsin: waning enthusiasm for his campaign among Democrats.
A Marquette University Law School poll released Wednesday, a day before the debate, underscored the problem.
The poll showed Trump and Biden deadlocked in Wisconsin, both in terms of registered voters and likely voters, but the underlying numbers were a warning sign for Biden, poll director Charles Franklin said. Trump is expected to officially receive the Republican nomination at the party’s national convention in less than three weeks in Milwaukee.
Voter enthusiasm is overwhelmingly on Trump’s side and that could be decisive in November, Franklin said.
“Here’s a path for Joe Biden to lose this election badly is that he has failed to inspire his supporters,” Franklin said Wednesday during an event on the Marquette campus. “They are not enthusiastic about him and his campaign, and they are much less likely to vote than those who are very enthusiastic, who are overwhelmingly pro-Trump.”
Wednesday’s poll found that voters who consider themselves very enthusiastic about voting sided with Trump over Biden (61% to 39%), and voters who describe themselves as less enthusiastic leaned toward Biden by significant margins, Franklin said.
“This raises a big question about turnout and what matters here, because Biden has real strength among voters who are not engaged,” he said. “Trump has real strength among the people who are really excited to participate. And so how does this balance out?”
At a viewing party at Carthage College in Kenosha, voters were dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump’s performance in the debate. The watch party was hosted by Braver Angels, a group hoping to bridge America’s partisan divide, and attendees agreed that both candidates performed poorly Thursday night.
“The ego battle – it got old really quickly,” says Rebecca Cataldi, 43, of Arlington, Virginia. “It would have been nice if they had been willing to put that aside and talk about what we need. ”
Cataldi said it felt like the country was being “bullied” into choosing Biden or Trump and she wasn’t happy about having to vote for either.
Aletheia Underhile, a student at Dakota Wesleyan University in South Dakota, said she liked the questions the moderators asked during the debate, but her biggest complaint was that they allowed the candidates to go off topic with their answers.
Underhile, who is 20, said 2024 is “daunting” for the first presidential election she can vote in, and wants to learn more about the third-party candidates before making her final decision.
“My perspective is essentially choosing Biden or Trump, deciding which is the lesser of two evils, and I’m not willing to choose either evil, even if it’s the lesser of two evils,” she said after the debate.
Journal Sentinel reporter Molly Beck and USA TODAY reporters Joey Garrison and Josh Meyers contributed.
Laura Schulte can be reached at leschulte@jrn.com and at @SchulteLaura.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Biden debate performance leaves voters in liberal Madison uninspired
