If You’re Reading This, I Don’t Care How You Felt About the Debate

I got about twenty minutes into the June 27th debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump before I turned it off, popped an edible, and went for a run.

I have a lot to say about all that has happened in the hours since, but before I get into the reasons I am deeply annoyed with the chattering pundit class, I must lay my cards on the table and let you know where I’m coming from.

As part of my self-destructive need to treat this election like a second job I have been quite relentlessly watching as many clips of Biden and Trump as I can stomach. In doing this, I have found it to be the case that reports of Joe Biden’s frailty have been greatly exaggerated, while people have been largely unaware of how diminished Donald Trump has become on the stump since they last had to regularly pay attention to him.

These observations have led me to believe in the run-up to the debate that Biden would clear a very low bar set for him by the conventional wisdom that he is an old man on the verge of senility, while Trump would kneecap his campaign by demonstrating that he is, in fact, an old man on the verge of senility.

I was half right!

Later that evening, I found the courage to watch the rest of the debate. By then, every college-educated, high-propensity white voter — the type who'd crawl over broken glass to participate in an off-year special election — had already decided tonight was the night Trump became President. Biden got a tiny bit better as it went on, but in the range of potential outcomes, this was nearly the worst-case scenario. He looked and sounded like the selectively-edited version of himself that is already well-baked into how people perceive him, and this was his single best opportunity to have changed that perception. It would, and should, have been a lay-up. All he needed to do was show up, look alive, get Trump talking, and take jabs at the worst person in the country. This would have reminded tens of millions of people, for the first time in years, why they also hate that guy.

Welp.

Instead, he spent a week with some Very Serious People boning up on facts and figures like he was intending to rebrand as Pete Buttigieg from the future, which could not be any more wrong for his particular brand of political acumen. Some bozo thought it would be a good idea for him to be doing campaign events all day before the debate, weakening his voice just enough to make him sound like a shell of himself. I don’t want to suggest that folks on the campaign were setting him up to fail in a House of Cards-esque scheme to install President Harris, but if you were trying to do that...

To make matters even more baffling, he spoke to supporters immediately after the debate, and again in Raleigh 12 hours later, and he was totally fine! If he was anything like that in the debate, it would have been a smashing success for him. But he wasn’t, so it wasn’t, and the universe of people who are going to see his remarks from today’s rally in North Carolina is a droplet in an ocean of people who will see him say we “beat Medicare.”

So with that all said...the post-debate punditry has been maddeningly terrible and I truly believe that some of you are too fucking stupid to be writing about and discussing politics for a living. Something something Kamala Harris coconut tree.

The launching of Solid Purple coincided with Trump being convicted on 34 felonies. That’s 1.2 felonies per day over the month of June. And in that time, the polls have moved slightly in Biden’s direction, though two surveys from Quinnipiac and The New York Times burst in like the Kool-Aid Man and tipped the forecast nominally in Trump’s favor. An hour before the debate, I ran the model and Trump had a 51% chance of winning, up from 49% on June 15th. So use your head for a second. Is the pool of voters who are not under the impression that Joe Biden is 160 years old orders of magnitude bigger than the pool of voters who would be potentially scandalized by a political candidate being a convicted felon after paying hush money to a porn star and laundering it through his personal attorney to skirt campaign finance laws?

More crucially, despite reports to the contrary, there actually were two participants in this debate, and simply by nature of being undecided or otherwise persuadable, the intended audience was interested in what both of them had to say, which cannot be said for the PMC wine moms who are losing their goddamned minds right now.

What did they think about what they saw? The snap polls after the debate show Trump clearly won, but every focus group has been net neutral, if not even a touch favorable for Biden. It is not rocket surgery to square the circle here. If Biden gave the worst debate performance in modern Presidential history, Trump was a close second. He was incoherent and deranged and did absolutely nothing to make himself more appealing to people who are already with him. And if you’ve read my previous blog posts, you’d know that the entire Trump 2024 campaign hinges on Biden’s standing with Black and Latino voters eroding substantially from his 2020 performance. I implore you to watch focus groups with non-white voters, or just look up “Black Jobs” on Twitter, and I think you’ll find that the folks who Biden had the hardest time keeping in his coalition so far were given a stark refresher that the alternative is not hypothetical.

So do I think that Trump is suddenly going to be up 10 in the polls after this? I’m not going to say that isn’t within the realm of possibility. But I think a lot of you are not prepared for the eventuality that the numbers could stay exactly the same, and you’re really not prepared for a situation where Biden improves in the polls because everyone who thought he botched the debate is a locked-in partisan, and the only people whose opinions matter here came away with a renewed distaste for the former host of The Celebrity Apprentice.

There are just so many ways this could shake out, and if you’re confident you know what the numbers will look like in two weeks, eat a banana and sit outside for a while.

That said, I’m not sure we’re all on the same page about the conversation we’re actually having. After watching that shitshow of a debate, is your concern with Joe Biden staying on the ticket about whether or not he will be able to win, or are you genuinely worried about his ability to do the work of being President, separate and apart from electoral considerations? Your answer can be “Both!,” that’s fine, but be honest with yourself because they are profoundly different questions. If you think he’s doing a good job but you’re merely concerned about the optics, say that! If you want to dive head first into the shallow end of an open convention because you’re afraid of what could happen if he *wins*, that would also be worth pointing out.

But if it’s simply the case that you’re chemically addicted to doomscrolling and everyone you know is almost as plugged into politics as you are, I think you should stop trying to predict the feelings of whatever chimera of a swing voter you invented in your head. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but they are unknowable little freaks. You and I, and everyone else in our bubble, are also little freaks, but we’re intensely predictable.

The least we could do is be humble about it.