If you wonder how much a Presidential debate really matters, it’s worth recalling the first time one aired on television. In September, 1960, Vice-President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, faced John F. Kennedy. Before the debate, Nixon held a narrow lead in the polls and was thought to have the edge in know-how and experience. But, within minutes of the broadcast’s start, it became clear that he had misjudged the moment and the medium. Having waved off a makeup artist, he looked spent and haggard. He often glanced at a clock on the studio wall, which made him look shifty and awkward beside the crisp young senator from Massachusetts.
Kennedy’s calm command of the facts was partly an illusion; he had spent days preparing with advisers, memorizing statistics from index cards—about steel production, Soviet scientists, and obstacles facing Black Americans in the job market—to make his case for a more equitable, ambitious society. Onstage, Nixon’s perceived advantage “vanished before the first debate was over,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her latest book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” Kennedy went on to prevail in one of the closest elections in American history, winning the popular vote by less than .02 per cent.
Nobody is expecting youthful vigor on June 27th, when Donald Trump, who recently turned seventy-eight, and Joe Biden, eighty-one, meet on the debate stage in Atlanta for their first encounter since the 2020 election. But it is unlikely to be sedate. After their first debate in 2020, Chris Wallace, who moderated, described it as a “mess,” and noted that Trump interrupted more than a hundred times. At one point, Biden muttered, “Will you shut up, man?” Days later, Trump was hospitalized with Covid, and withdrew from the next debate. When they met for the final time, the production staff managed to achieve some decorum by muting each candidate’s microphone whenever his opponent was answering a question.
Until recently, it wasn’t clear that Trump and Biden would ever share a stage again. But last month their campaigns announced plans for two debates, which have the potential for even greater stakes and strangeness than four years ago. Since they are meeting nearly three months earlier than usual in a Presidential election, there would, in theory, be enough time for either party to find a replacement, in the event of a catastrophic performance. More likely, however, the spectacle of Biden and Trump side by side, and effectively tied in the polls, could jolt the electorate, swaying some of the disaffected voters who have preferred to ignore the choice before them. That would be a vivid test of Biden’s adage about elections: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
To create what the host network, CNN, has called, in a hopeful phrase, a “civilized discussion,” mikes will be muted except during direct questions. Moreover, there will be no studio audience for the first time since 1960, a condition that will deprive Trump of the chance to bring in guests intended to intimidate his opponent. (Facing Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump brought three women who had accused her husband of sexual misconduct.) Efforts to civilize the discussion will be tested. In the weeks since Trump was convicted on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, to cover up the payment of hush money to a porn star, he has been in frenetic overdrive, raising money—donations have surged—and escalating his incendiary rhetoric in e-mails to supporters with messages such as “HAUL OUT THE GUILLOTINE!” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, recently told an audience of young conservatives in Detroit that the election is a matter of “victory or death.”
It is a measure of this curious rematch that some of Trump’s opponents are eager to boost his visibility. Because Trump posts almost exclusively on his own social-media site, and most broadcasters do not air his rallies, Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, said last week that she suspects voters have not absorbed how “pornographically violent” his rhetoric has become. As George Conway, the former Republican strategist, put it recently, “The more you see of him, the more you say, ‘What is wrong with him?’ ”
Biden, for his part, enters the debate without the lead he had at this stage in 2020, and he’s still acclimating to a forceful new posture of attack. For months, while Democrats pushed him to slash at Trump for his criminal trials, the President held back, wary that doing so could be portrayed as interfering in the prosecution. But, since the Trump verdict was delivered, on May 30th, a raft of polls have shown a small but consistent shift away from him, and the President has seized on that signal. At a fund-raiser, he labelled Trump a “convicted felon” who “snapped,” and his campaign has released a wave of television ads in swing states, showing Trump’s mug shot and images of him in court, and calling him a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.”
It’s tempting to wonder, given that the candidates are so well known, what impact another appearance together could really have. Mitchell McKinney, of the University of Akron, who for decades has measured voters’ attitudes before and after debates, said that a decisive performance could move crucial votes on the margins: “We always find a slice—no more than five per cent—who say, ‘I wasn’t sure, but now I am.’ That can make a difference in a razor-thin election, and we’ve got one of those right now.”
Predicting what might make the difference is more difficult. Will Trump confirm his vow to pardon followers jailed for violence on January 6th? Or his aim to gut the Justice Department? Will Biden defend abortion rights boldly enough to inspire young voters who recoil from his handling of the U.S. response to the war in the Middle East? Can he defuse criticisms about inflation and immigration? The most searing moment, for two candidates dogged by questions about age and acuity, could be something unsaid. In a 1984 debate, Ronald Reagan stirred concern when he lost his way and abandoned a story about the Pacific Coast Highway; in 2011, Rick Perry’s primary bid all but ended when he blanked on the name of a government agency he intended to eliminate. (“Oops,” he said.) At times, a turn in history is obvious even as it is happening. While watching the 1960 debate, Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, reportedly told those around him, “That son of a bitch just lost us the election.” ♦
