Wow, so I had written a whole top to this article and after watching I’ve completely thrown it out. If you want to hear a history of the debates effects on recent presidential elections let me know and I’ll write another post.
This was the worst presidential debate I’ve ever seen in my life. The moderator was completely ineffective, the participants had no respect for the rules, and the voters learned nothing. It was atrocious and both sides should be ashamed of themselves. We deserved far better and what we got was worse than anything I could have possibly imagined. It’s being called a circus and I think that’s offensive to circus workers.
President Trump
Everyone expected the president to come out swinging tonight and swing he did. He swung at everyone and anyone (except white supremacists but we’ll get to that later) including the moderator. The president’s primary job tonight was to win swing voters over but he seemed to be more focussed on airing his personal grievances and strengthening his base. Overall the president landed more clear points than Biden and in speaking more and commanding the stage I think if anyone came out ahead tonight it was him. That being said he did it spouting massive falsehoods and saying some seriously troubling things. There are frankly too many false statements to list here so here are some big takeaways. One, the president refused to condemn white supremacy. Two, pretty much everything the president said about mail-in voting was completely false He cited fraud Caroline Maloney’s race here in NY where no fraud was found, in fact her opponent Suraj Patel issued this statement tonight and said “Trump lied about what happened here”. Three, in the climate change section the president repeatedly blamed poor forest management for the fires in California. Over 47% of California is federal land so when the president cites mismanagement he neglects to mention that his administration is doing a significant amount of the mismanaging. Lastly the president refused to accept the results of the election saying “it will not end well”. This tactic has worked for Trump in the past but I think he may have taken it so far that it hurt more than it helped.
Vice President Biden
Vice President Biden had a lot of things to accomplish tonight. First he had to exceed the expectation put out there by the Trump campaign that he didn’t have the stamina for the debates and he succeeded at that. He had to set a stark contrast with the president and he certainly did that. He had to hold his own with the president and land clear responses to Trump’s challenges. That is where I think he fell short. He almost completely failed to land clear and concise responses and frequently fell back on his stump speech for responses to questions and challenges he had to have been prepared for. The worst moment in my opinion was when he threw his shoulder into what seemed like a rehearsed line about his son Beau being a hero. Now my issue is not with the substance everyone who serves this country is a hero. My issue is that it so clearly invited the response it got and that response was far more effective than the statement itself. He recovered from this slightly making a very moving statement about his son Hunter but it never should’ve gotten there. To his credit the former VP did make some solid points that I imagine people haven’t heard with the campaign not holding the normal number of events. Overall I think Biden got some very bad prep advice and I hope he changes his tactics next time.
Who Won?
The voters certainly didn’t. If I had to say anyone did better tonight I’d have to say the President did but I think they both failed tonight and I think tonight was largely a waste of time. CNN’s Dana Bash may have said it best “we’d love to be talking about the substance right now, but it’s unclear how much substance there was”.