The strategy for beating Donald Trump in a debate is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is poke him, heckle him, and let the guy come unglued.
Trump’s strength on a debate stage is that he is an authoritarian demagogue. He can brazen through, go on the attack, and just make shit up. And, as I wrote last week, the rhetorical power of authoritarian appeals is that they hold out the promise of simple solutions to complex problems.
But his unique weakness is that he has zero impulse control. He’s a loser, and he falls apart whenever you point out that he’s a loser. So what you need to do is just keep delivering jabs and letting him swing wildly in response, reminding the audience that he’s a complete and utter disaster. (Don’t compare golf handicaps! Say “Donald, everyone knows you cheat at golf.” Then sit back and watch his brains leak out his ears.)
I think part of what made last night’s debate such an awful viewing experience was that Democratic partisans tuned in and wanted someone to take those shots at Trump. (You just called Biden a criminal? Maaaan, isn’t your sentencing hearing is in two weeks? How do you expect to sway the whole country to your vision when you can’t even sway a jury of your peers?)
The moderators weren’t countering his lies. He knew that going in. So he just made shit up. And Biden wasn’t up to the task either. It was dispiriting. What a mess.
I have three thoughts to share right now.
(1) That was awful. But also, most likely, temporary.
We are 4+ months away from the election. There are 130 days between now and then. 130 days before today was February 19th. Off the top of your head, what do you recall about mid-February political news?
Electoral campaign events in late June do not determine the outcome of a November election. You cannot win or lose the election in June. There are too many news cycles between now and then. Democratic enthusiasm is going to be dampened based on last night’s debate. But that won’t have a direct impact on turnout, because of recency bias.
Donald Trump is a uniquely awful campaigner. The guy runs his campaigns like he runs his companies — its basically just grifting all the way down. He is undisciplined at the best of times, and melts down over perceived slights. He has a sentencing hearing four days before the RNC. He will not handle it with aplomb.
There will be episodes that replace this debate in our minds. This isn’t to say that the debate won’t matter at all, but it is to say that our current impressions will fade. They always do. That’s just how it works.
(2) But the question is what last night signifies.
Charitably, I think there are two ways to read last night’s debate performance.
One is that Biden had a cold. He sounded hoarse, he was a step slower than usual, but it was just a bad night. People have bad nights. Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney was an off night too. But Biden will get some rest, some vitamin C, and he’ll go back to beating expectations. Throughout the general election, he’ll look like the Joe Biden from the State of the Union.
The other is that Biden has lost a step. This has been the fear (sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken) all along. Campaigning takes a lot of stamina. Governing does too. The Presidency ages you. What if last night was a preview of the general election contest?
I don’t know which reality we are living in. If it’s the former, then everyone should chill out, get some rest, and keep moving forward. If it’s the latter, then party leadership needs to do something drastic. And by “party leadership,” I mean “Biden’s closest friends and confidants.” Because no one can force him to step aside. The only route at this point would be for him to make that decision himself.
(3) If it isn’t Biden, then it’s Harris.
We should be clear about this. There is no time machine available. You can’t jump back a year and hold a competitive open primary. The only clear successor is the Vice President. Even if you think Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg or Gretchen Whitmer would be a stronger candidate in a vacuum, there is no mechanism by which one of them is named Biden’s replacement without embroiling the party network in righteous partisan infighting.
Keep in mind that there were no real competitive primaries on either side. The political press has spent months with basically nothing to do. That’s a lot of pent-up energy that will get directed toward "DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY” if Biden were to be replaced. You can, functionally, only replace him with Kamala Harris.
Today, marinating in the hangover of an awful debate performance, that seems like an option worth considering to me. Harris didn’t run a great primary campaign in 2020. Her favorability ratings aren’t great. The Republicans would run a vicious campaign against her, tapping into the deep wells of racism and sexism that American political culture often blithely pretends won’t exist. (They’d inevitably call her a "DEI presidential candidate” or some such nonsense. It would get gross. And it would make her path to victory just a bit harder.)
There’s no perfect candidate waiting in the wings. It’s about 50/50 that Donald Trump — a convicted felon who galvanized an attempted insurrection the last time he lost — will regain power and rule with a vindictive fury that is at most barely held in check by his own abject incompetence. This is going to be tense. If you aren’t worried, then you’re either lying to yourself or keeping yourself distracted.
The campaign isn’t over yet. But we’re at a fork in the road. It feels a bit like leafing through one of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, except every branching path somehow ends with “and then an ogre devours your skull.”
Every option from here is risky, and the stakes are existential.
I hope someone with more insight than me sees a path forward, and has the wherewithal to implement.