Why Biden Won The First Debate
By: Dave Olsen
Tags: Politics, 2020, Elections, Debate, Trump

Why Biden Won The First Debate

The first debate was a sorry reflection on Trump’s presidency — but the attacks, often personal, on Biden didn’t stick.

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It speaks volumes about the low-grade quality of the first debate that the Commission on Presidential Debates has promised changes to ensured added “structure” in the upcoming debates.

Trump knows nothing else than his signature style: tangential ranting and unhinged vitriol. The debate, given the failure to adapt the format for extra control beforehand, was doomed to descend into a shouting match between the two candidates. The question was not “would Trump attack Biden?” but rather “how far will Biden go to counter Trump’s attacks?”.

Trump combined harsh attacks on his opponent with constant interruptions, in an attempt to both anger and disrupt Biden, perhaps preying in a calculated (and rather cruel) gamble on the former Vice President’s well-documented stammer.

But, though Biden’s stammer was somewhat evident in fits and starts as the President interrupted him 73 times, often in his supposedly “uninterrupted” first 2 minutes for each section, Biden was able to brush off Trump’s interruption, personal attacks, and disruptive tactics with relative success.

Trump first tried to stick the “socialist” attack line, trying to portray Biden as a hostage of the radical left to scare his base — and many independents and GOP-leaning voters who currently tend towards Biden in the polls — into voting favourably to him. But people know Joe Biden. His name recognition and brand durability are about as strong as they could be. These “socialist” attack ads haven’t worked, and the strategy didn’t work in the debate either.

If anything, this line is a sign of how desperate Trump’s campaign is: he would have loved to be debating Warren or Sanders, who could be more easily portrayed as part of the “radical left” and “socialists”.

When the socialist line clearly wasn’t cutting through, Trump tried a different (and rather baffling) line: “you just lost the left”. The strategy was simple — bring up a left-wing proposal (the Green New Deal and defunding the police were the two Trump brought up) and then ask Biden if he supports it. When Biden says he doesn’t, the President interjected quickly: “you just lost the (radical) left”.

This line is arguably even more counter-productive than the socialist one; it actively reinforces Biden’s hold over independents, suburban voters, and the Rust Belt.

Trump also set himself up to fail even before the debate had begun, repeating the claim that Biden was senile and forgetful in attack ads and at campaign rallies. If you are going to call your opponent senile, imply they are in decline and have dementia, then you better beat them in the debate.

That 60% of Americans believed Biden to have won, compared to 28% that thought Trump had won, shows just how much this framing backfired on Trump. He broke the key rule of political campaign framing: under-promise and over-deliver.

To make things even worse than Trump, and to reinforce the suggestion that the “senile” framing backfired significantly on the President after his weak debate performance where he always looked the angrier of the two, 6% more Americans polled thought better of Biden than worse after the debate, while Trump had a net rating from the debate of negative 18%.

Tied into this framing dynamic is one important thing that was missing from the debate — a Biden gaffe. If “I am the Democratic party” is the statement that is most mocked following a debate, then that’s a reasonable success for Biden, given his high-profile (and damaging) gaffes in the past, including the “you ain’t black” if you vote for Trump gaffe.

What makes the lack of a slip-up more impressive was the extent and frequency of the interruptions and angry attacks from the President, who looked completely unhinged. By far the most significant single line from the debate, it seems, was Trump’s “stand back and stand by” message to white supremacist group Proud Boys, who clearly took the message very literally.

Biden also impressively laughed off Trump’s most significant false or ridiculous claims — such as when the President claimed that “we have perhaps the lowest carbon”. This worked well to undermine these falsehoods, and Biden was also able to shrug off Trump’s claims of success with the coronavirus, citing the 200,000 deaths and 7 million cases.

Perhaps the best moment for Biden in terms of dealing with the increasingly predictable and exasperated President was his “will you shut up, man?” line, delivered with just the right level of anger to appeal to the frustration in much of the country with the President, without going too far beyond Presidential norms.

Another important contrast between the candidates was on message discipline and cut-through moments. Trump ranting style is not conducive to any kind of message discipline (though he did pivot well to mail-in fraud to try to undermine the election in the final section of the debate); Biden was much better at taking key moments to talk to the camera about his core messages, on the pandemic, healthcare, and the need to get out and vote — countering Trump’s undermining of the election.

Trump needed some kind of big knockdown, if not a knockout, the muscle his way back into a losing race. And while he did have occasional moments, such as when he went after Biden over Antifa and violence in American cities, and Biden responded that Antifa doesn’t actually exist (correctly but ineffectively for many mid-west voters), he did not get any sort of big moment to win the debate.

That is a big problem for Trump, and he remains significantly behind in the polls. Whether that will widen in the coming days is yet to be seen, but this performance has left Trump needing a miracle to turn the tide of the election.

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