When two flawed presidential candidates, President Biden and former President Trump, met in their high-stakes debate on Thursday night, they both hoped to pass a test in the eyes of the voters. Both failed — but Biden’s stumbles, fair or not, will likely cost him more than Trump’s.
Biden had to allay concerns that he was too old to serve effectively for another four years. His stumbling, sometimes incoherent performance fell far short. He looked his 81st year — markedly less forceful and fresh than the leadership figure who delivered an effective State of the Union address about four months ago.
Trump, who is 78, had to look and sound presidential to appeal to voters who doubt his temperament and stability. He had to resist the indulgent temptation to claim that every election he loses was rigged and that every legal setback he suffered was politically motivated. He failed too.
The 90-minute debate was a dispiriting race to the bottom, with an octogenarian tongue-tied against a pathological liar. Undecided voters looking for a positive reason to vote one way or the other were unlikely to find relief.
But that doesn’t mean it was a draw. If it had been a boxing match — an apt analogy, given the barrage of verbal jabs — a referee likely would have awarded Trump a points victory, for two reasons.
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First, Biden came into the debate as the candidate who needed to shake up the campaign. Trump has led by a hair in recent national polls, but he’s clearly ahead in most of the six battleground states that will decide the election. Biden hoped to change that, so he needed a win.
Second, while Trump missed an opportunity to appeal to undecided voters and increase his support, he did a more effective job than Biden in presenting his favorite talking points. Many of them were untrue and some were nonsensical, but most were not refuted by Biden or the CNN moderators, who had vowed not to fact check at night. That left Trump no worse off than when he started.
The impact of a debate often comes down to a few memorable moments. Many voters didn’t watch at all, and some who did didn’t stay for the full 90 minutes. But over the next week or two, some of their worst moments will be played and replayed, magnifying their impact.
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A few examples of each candidate’s worst moments can convey the flavor of the evening. (A list of their best moments would be scarce.)
Biden’s voice was hoarse and cracking, especially early in the debate. He seemed to lose the thread of his thought more than once, his voice trailing off at the end of several answers. He ended a muddled explanation of his tax proposals with the enigmatic line, “when we finally defeat Medicare.” After another such moment, Trump seized the opportunity to make sure viewers took notice, saying, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said.”
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Trump lied with his usual gusto, rehashing false claims he’d honed in dozens of campaign speeches. He said that during his time as president, he’d created “the greatest economy in the history of our country,” but that’s not true by any definition of economic success. He claimed that Democratic states routinely kill babies “after birth,” a grim mischaracterization of late-stage abortion. He claimed that Biden’s immigration policies have allowed “18, 19, maybe 20 million” undocumented immigrants into the country, a wild exaggeration, and that the Biden administration is “putting them on Social Security and Medicare.” (Not true.)
All those whoppers are familiar to anyone who has attended Trump’s rallies; they have all been debunked. But there were too many for Biden to break down one by one, so he responded: “Everything he just said was a lie.”
And Trump dodged every question he didn’t want to answer — including whether he would abide by the election results. “If it’s a fair, legal, good election, absolutely,” he said — but he immediately undermined that semi-promise by claiming that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. (It wasn’t.)
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There are major differences between these two candidates on important issues in the country, and voters deserved a debate that highlighted their choice. This was not that debate.
Instead, it was a missed opportunity for both candidates, one that would not only hurt Biden’s chances of eroding Trump’s lead but would also surely reignite the barely suppressed debate among Democrats over whether they have their best possible candidate.
With four months to go until Election Day, the race will undoubtedly take more twists and turns. But Thursday’s debate was certainly a pivotal moment — a setback for Biden that he must now recover from.
Read more from columnist Doyle McManus on Trump and California:
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
