Malarkey
Joe Biden had a bad night. Elite panic made it worse. What will voters think?
I. The Aftermath
This week, The Texas Standard asked for my perspective on the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Then SCOTUS dropped a big one, so I got bumped. So that I’m not too bummed out about not getting to send the clip to my mom, here are the notes I put together for that interview.
First and foremost, I agree with my wife, another academic and a scholar of presidential history, that best part of the debate was an advertisement for Calm, a meditation app designed to lower your stress levels. Bravo to those marketers, because everyone watching that debate had their shoulders hunched up to their ears.
I think about politics in terms of stories. Stories are how humans think, and I think you can understand a lot about politics if you ask who is trying to sell what story. In the face of concerns about his age, Biden wanted last night’s story to be that he was in command. Trump wanted the story to be that the country was struggling on immigration and inflation and that he would help fix both.
It was immediately clear—apparently minutes into the debate—that Biden had not cleared that bar; as a viewer, it felt to me like Biden's age had finally caught up with the caricature conservative media has had of him. Leaders in both parties and in the media thought that the main story coming out of the debate was that Biden had a terrible performance, barely getting his answers out. Some Democrats, including former Mayor of San Antonio Julian Castro and data scientist Nate Silver, called for him to drop out. Most Democratic leaders in Texas went stone cold silent online, as journalist Scott Braddock noted on Twitter/X.
In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, a book about disasters, Rebecca Solnit explores something called “elite panic.” She argues that during disasters, most people are calm; it’s leaders that panic. Last night felt like elite panic to me. CNN’s coverage of the event, which I watched, was disastrous for Biden.
That elite panic will probably have an impact. Here’s John Sides quoting political scientist Kim Fridkin:
“Our findings suggest that voters’ attitudes are influenced by the arguments presented directly by the candidates during the debate as well as by the media’s instant analyses of the candidates’ debate performances….the impact of the candidates’ messages was often altered by the media’s instant analyses.”
What we don’t know yet is how voters will respond, either to the debate or to the coverage after it. CNN had some a flash poll suggesting 2/3 of people thought Trump won the debate. But in its focus group of undecided voters in Michigan, more than half said the debate led them to decide to vote for Biden. And the task isn’t to win a debate; it’s to win an election. We’ll know more in the next few weeks about whether voters take their cues from elites panicking about Biden’s performance, or if they saw the debate a different way. One young voter I talked with this morning said her feed was all about how the candidates squabbled with each other, not about Biden being unable to cut it.
Afternoon update: Most of my smartest takes come the other academic in our household. Here’s another one: before the debate, voters overwhelmingly thought Biden too feeble for the job of president. It’s possible that for voters, this idea was already baked in. If the polling doesn’t change in the next couple of weeks, that might be why.
But that rosiest of possible scenarios still isn’t good enough for Biden. See below for a bit on where the race stands (more on that below). Biden is down in the polling in all the critical swing states; if nothing changes in this race, odds are Trump wins in November.
Wait, do debates matter? Generally, political scientists will tell you debates probably don’t matter, but I find it hard to agree with them—I don’t think we have enough data to make a claim. I really liked Elliot Morris’s piece about that on fivethirtyeight.com on this, and here’s another article from a couple of academics, which says:
“Communication scholars Mitchell McKinney and Benjamin Warner have empirical findings that show presidential primary debates, where less is known about the candidates, have a much greater influence on vote choice than general election debates. They analyzed surveys of general election and primary debate viewers between 2000 and 2012 and discovered that only 3.5% of general election viewers switched from one candidate to the other, but 35% of primary election viewers changed their candidate preference.
Only 3.5%? That is an order of magnitude larger than the margins by which today’s swing states swing.
A 2003 meta-analysis of debate effects found that:
“General campaign debates increase issue knowledge and issue salience (the number of issues a voter uses to evaluate candidates) and can change preference for candidates' issue stands. Debates can have an agenda-setting effect. Debates can alter perceptions of the candidates' personality, but they do not exert a significant effect on perceptions of the candidates' competence (leadership ability). Debates can affect vote preference.”
Will Biden drop out? I doubt it. His biographer explained last night that part of his mythology is kind of like Batman: he may get knocked down, but he always, always gets back up. And there’s no party mechanism to force him out, so other Democrats can either try to persuade him to leave, or they can get back in line and help him win.
What happens if he does? There are two months between now and the Democratic convention, where parties make their nominees official. Historically, those conventions were for parties to choose candidates. In the wake of the 1968 convention, however, reforms to primary voting has meant that there hasn’t been a convention used like that except once, by Republicans, in 1976. For more on that, see Ezra Klein’s February interview with Elaine Kamarck. But that’s squarely in Biden’s hands: having won all the primaries, Biden is in the driver’s seat of that kind of decision.
II. My Debate Prep, Just for Kicks
In advance of the debate, I sat down to think about what I expected to see, what I thought viewers ought to be thinking about in advance, and what they shouldn’t focus on. And boy howdy was I wrong about one big thing.
First, on the state of the race. I found myself nodding along with Nate Silver’s model this morning; this race isn’t a tossup (yet). Silver gives Trump a 66% chance of winning. Most of the polling shows Biden catching up to pretty much even, but that isn’t a good sign for Biden; the states that matter often vote a little to the right of the national average, so in order to win, Biden probably needs to win the national race by 2-3 percentage points in order to tip those states.
Those six states, which you’ll accidentally memorize between now and November, are Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, along with Nebraska’s second congressional district, NB-2, whose one electoral vote is determined separately from the rest of the ruby-red state. Nothing is certain in politics, and surely some state will surprise us, but those are the states most politicos are watching. How about this for jangling one’s nerves: if Biden wins the three Rust Belt states (MI, WI, PA) and NB-2, and Trump wins the other three (NV, GA, AZ), that’s 270 electoral votes for a victorious Biden and 268 for a losing Trump. If 2016 and 2020 are any indication, each of those states will likely come down to a few tens of thousands of votes. My favorite graphic from previous elections is the “snake chart” from FiveThirtyEight, which is back, baby!
What should people know about the debate?
This debate is being hosted by CNN. That’s new; usually, a nonpartisan nonprofit runs them, but the candidates bailed on that this cycle. There will be no audience, and there is a lot of hubbub about the moderators being able to shut off people’s mics, but I think folks have forgotten that this was partly the case in the second 2020 debate, which was a much more controlled affair than the first.
I can’t understand why the Trump campaign would agree to this format, which seems the opposite of playing to Trump’s crowd-dependent strengths. The best explanation that I’ve heard is that it allows the Trump campaign to make the case that he’s at a disadvantage thanks to CNN’s rules (even though his campaign agreed to them).
The debate is happening earlier than ever. Neither candidate, in fact, has officially become their party’s nominee. It’s also the first time two previous/current presidents have faced off in a televised debate like this (and I think the first time since 1912 that two previous/current presidents have been in the running).
Don’t forget about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivax former Democrat, or the other two minor candidates. RFK is polling in the high single digits and could very much spoil this race. He may also qualify for the next debate (he didn’t make the cut for this one), which might lead one or both candidates to back out of that debate.
General election presidential debates don’t get quite as many viewers as the Super Bowl, but they do tend to get more than AFC Championships. Polls suggest this debate could be closer to Super Bowl territory. One estimate: 60% of Americans planned to watch, which after kids and immigrants would be 130m people.
Biden has been preparing hard for this debate. Trump has been having policy “refreshers” with key advisors. But he did this in 2020, too, so I don’t think there’s as much of a story there as others do.
A lot of the news ahead of the debate, so the story goes, is about expectations management. A lot of pundits are saying that Republicans have set the bar so low for Biden he’s sure to clear it, and so now they’re trying to fix that by accusing Biden of taking performance enhancing drugs (like Tucker Carlson’s Zen packets, maybe?). If the expectations management theory is right, the Trump campaign’s messaging that Trump isn’t spending as much time preparing as Biden is probably also a way to lower expectations of Trump.
Do debates matter?
I would raise an eyebrow at anyone who claims to know the answer to that, unless they have access to the multiverse.
The case for no: Most voters’ opinions are already set—over 90% of previously registered voters will vote the same way in 2024 as they did in 2020—and low information voters (read: most Americans) are not likely to tune into the debate, either. They’re more likely to be swayed one way or another in the days leading up to when they cast their ballot. At best, one candidate or the other might get a “bump” in the polls like in the wake of a solid party convention.
The case for yes: Debates can generate moments that really stick in voters’ minds—including yours, if you stop and think about it, right? And it is a chance for candidates to set the agenda for the next few weeks of the campaign and to frame issues to their advantage. They may not tend to change minds, but they can alter what people are thinking about heading into the polling stations. Plus, that bit about 90% of previously registered voters having their minds made up? There could be 30 million new voters in 2024. And because lower information voters tend to favor Trump, as voters get more information (like from the debate), it could benefit Biden.
Reality check: It’s probably a little bit of both. Given the narratives about Biden’s age and Trump’s character, if something wild happens in this debate, it could reshape the race—or people could switch it on, get bored, and switch it off again.
What should I have been watching for?
As a voter: Listen to these candidates’ pitches and make your own decision about which person you want to vote for. Maybe you’re thinking about your own finances, or Ukraine, or abortion, or who is more trustworthy, or who would handle the economy better. The magic of democratic elections is that you get to (/have to) decide not only who to vote for, but what values and priorities drive that decision. Don’t let anybody else tell you “what this election is about!”
As a political nerd: Agood debate for Biden would be to come across strong, confident, and in command. A good debate for Trump would be to look… hinged? He is widely considered to have blown it in the first 2020 debate by taking such wide, uncontrolled swings at Biden. I suspect that both candidates would deliver on that, and basically ignore the other, each expecting the other to dig their own grave.
Both candidates, their campaigns influenced to some degree by political scientists, will probably be focused on how to use clips of the debate to continue to energize, raise money from, and eventually turn their key voters out to the polls. Fewer will be thinking about persuasion, which campaigns have largely given up on (and which I disagree with).
As a savvy voter: One of my areas of research is on the role of stories, or narratives, in politics. You probably already know enough to know what stories these candidates want you to take away about themselves, and about their opponents; it’s in the discourse enough that ChatGPT knows what they’ll probably say!
In addition to these stories, candidates will tell us stories about the country, how it’s doing, where it’s headed, and where they would take it.
They’ll also try to tell you what matters. The Biden campaign wants you to think this election is about some list that includes democracy, abortion, healthcare, low unemployment, inequality, and personal character / felony status. The Trump campaign wants you to think this election is about crime, imigration, inflation, and wokeness.
Again, you get to/have to choose what stories you choose to believe! Welcome.