ATLANTA (AP) — President Joe Biden and his Republican rival, Donald Trump, will meet Thursday for a debate that offers an unprecedented opportunity for both candidates to try to reshape the political narrative.
Biden, the incumbent Democratic president, has a chance to reassure voters that, at age 81, he is capable of guiding the US through a series of challenges. Trump, 78, could use the moment to move past his felony conviction in New York and convince an audience of tens of millions that he is temperamentally suited to return to the Oval Office.
Biden and Trump enter the night against fierce headwinds, including a public tired of the tumult of party politics. According to polls, both candidates are disliked by the majority of Americans and offer sharply different views on virtually every core issue. Trump has promised sweeping plans to overhaul the US government when he returns to the White House, and Biden claims his opponent would pose an existential threat to the country’s democracy.
With just over four months until Election Day, their performance has the rare potential to change the trajectory of the race. Every word and gesture will be analyzed not only for what both men say, but also for the way they interact and how they hold up under pressure.
“Debates tend not to change voters’ perceptions in a way that changes their votes: they tend to amplify, but they don’t persuade,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on the field of presidential communications. “What makes this debate different is that you essentially have two incumbents about whom voters have very well-formed views. But that doesn’t mean those perceptions are accurate or match what voters will see on stage.”
The debate marks a series of firsts
Trump and Biden have not stood on the same stage or even spoken since their final debate weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration after making an unprecedented and failed attempt to overturn his loss to Biden , which culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by his supporters.
Thursday’s broadcast on CNN will be the first general election debate in history. It is the first-ever televised presidential general election debate hosted by a single news channel, after both campaigns ditched the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which had called every match since 1988.
According to network rules, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not eligible.
To avoid a repeat of their chaotic 2020 matchups, Biden pushed — and Trump agreed — to hold the debate without an audience and allow the network to mute the candidates’ microphones if it doesn’t their turn to speak. There will be two commercial breaks, again a departure from modern practice. The candidates have agreed not to consult staff or others as long as the cameras are turned off.
The timing follows moves by both candidates to respond to national trends toward early voting by moving the political calendar forward. It remains to be seen whether the advanced scheme will mitigate or crystallize the consequences of any missteps in the minds of the public.
“You have two guys who haven’t debated in four years,” said Phillippe Reines, a Democratic political consultant who helped former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepare for debates with Trump in 2016.
Biden and Trump, he said, “don’t like each other, haven’t seen each other, (are) pretty rusty heading into the biggest night of their lives. That pretty much sums up what’s at stake on Thursday.”
Both parties recognize the commitment
The debate comes days after the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ended a federally guaranteed right to abortion and put reproductive rights at the center of politics since.
The confrontation also comes just after the Biden White House took executive action to limit asylum applications at the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to reduce the number of migrants entering the country. Trump has made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza loom over the race, as do the candidates’ widely divergent views on America’s role in the world and its alliances. Differences in inflation, tax policies and government investments to build infrastructure and combat climate change will create further contrasts.
Also in the political backdrop, the Supreme Court is about to announce its decision on whether Trump is legally immune from his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection. That comes weeks after Trump was convicted in New York of participating in a hush-money scheme that prosecutors alleged was designed to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.
Biden spent the week leading up to the debate at Camp David, sequestered with senior White House and campaign aides, as well as a coterie of longtime advisers and allies. A fake stage was built on the grounds to simulate the studio where the debate will be held, and Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, reprized his role as Trump during practice sessions.
Aides say the work reflects Biden’s recognition that he can’t afford a flat display. They claim the sometimes dour orator would rise to the occasion.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued his more unstructured debate preparation with two days of meetings at his Florida estate, calling allies and supporters, and testing attacks in social media posts and in interviews with conservative-leaning media.
Trump and his aides have spent months documenting what they say are signs of Biden’s waning staying power. In recent days, they began predicting that Biden will be stronger on Thursday, aiming to raise expectations for the incumbent president.
The candidates have Georgia in mind
Atlanta, the debate’s host city, offers symbolic and practical significance to the campaign, but both sides believe what happens there will resonate far and wide.
In 2020, Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of less than 12,000 votes out of a total of 5 million votes cast. Trump urged the state’s Republican leadership to overturn his victory based on false theories of voter fraud, memorably being caught on tape saying he wanted to “find 11,780 votes.” He now faces state racketeering charges.
Both campaigns hosted a series of events in Atlanta that led to the debate, including competing events at local Black-owned businesses. Trump called into a meeting at Rocky’s Barbershop in the Buckhead community on Friday to talk about his matchup with Biden and question whether CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash would treat him fairly.
As we leave the debate, both Biden and Trump will travel to states they hope to reach this fall. Trump is heading to Virginia, a former battleground that has shifted to the Democrats in recent years.
Biden is about to fly to North Carolina, where he is expected to hold his campaign’s largest-ever rally in a state that Trump narrowly carried in 2020.
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Miller, Superville and Weissert reported from Washington and Price from New York. AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Washington contributed to this report.
