Biden’s Disastrous Debate

His position as the Democrat nominee is now in serious jeopardy.

By John Graunt

(Note to the Reader:

For a quick reaction to American political news, I often turn to a friend now writing under the name of John Graunt. He sent me a version of this, and I thought it was so helpful I had my editors make it into a post. Enjoy!

—Ayann)

President Biden and former President Trump met for the first debate of the 2024 presidential race last night in Atlanta.

It was such a catastrophe for the Biden campaign that many are already calling it the end of his Presidency.

This debate was his campaign’s idea, and everything about it was rigged in his favor. It was the earliest debate ever, and the first to be held between presumptive nominees before the party conventions. Biden also got everything he wanted regarding its format. This included no third-party candidates, a friendly host network (CNN) and moderators, no studio audience, and muted microphones when it was the other’s turn. All of this was supposed to work to his advantage and to blunt Trump’s tactics.

He demanded all this because he sorely needed a win to reset a race he’s been losing. For months Trump has held a small but steady lead in national polls overall and, crucially, in five out of the seven battleground states that are expected to decide the outcome. On Wednesday, the influential analyst Nate Silver summed up the state of the race on the eve of the debate with a piece entitled, “The presidential election isn’t a toss-up,” giving Trump a 66% chance of winning in November.

So it’s no wonder that Democrats were reported to be freaking out. Biden needed Thursday night to be a turning point, and above all to convince skeptical voters that he's still got the stamina and mental acuity to see out a second term. The 81-year-old’s age has long been his biggest liability, with poll after poll showing even many Democrats are concerned about it. A Siena College/New York Times poll in March found no fewer than 73% of registered voters thought Biden was too old for another four years.

So the debate was a make-or-break moment for Biden to demonstrate his mental fitness – and boy did he blow it. Having called for an early debate to remind voters of Trump’s threat to democracy, he instead showcased his own senescence.

As the event opened, the camera first panned to Biden walking stiffly to his lectern, his microphone picking up the sound of him mumbling to himself. As soon as he started speaking, it became clear that his voice sounded weak, raspy and feeble, which aides blamed on a cold he apparently picked up during his seven days spent prepping for the Atlanta forum in seclusion. When he wasn’t talking and CNN put him up on the split screen, his facial expression was frozen, mouth agape, with a thousand-yard stare. But even worse, when he was talking, his answers to questions throughout the evening were frequently rambling, vague or tailed off into confusion.

At one point he declared that the US economy had created “15,000” jobs on his watch, rather than the 15 million he presumably intended, at another that there are “one thousand trillionaires in America.” He again confused the tragic story of his son Beau, claiming that he “died in Iraq,” rather than – in reality – of a brain tumor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. When he was asked about abortion, he randomly started talking about migrant crime instead. But perhaps the most painful moment of the night was his response to a question about the national debt, which launched him off into a meandering train of thought about “making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with, umm dealing with everything we had to do with” – before grinding to a halt. After an agonizing brain freeze for several seconds where he couldn’t say anything at all, he looked back up and concluded: “Look, we finally beat Medicare.” Trump pounced: “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”

Nor did Biden land a glove on Trump on the issues that matter most to voters: inflation, the economy and immigration. He attempted to blame inflation on the way Trump handled the pandemic, only for the former President to reply that Biden “inherited almost no inflation, and it stayed that way for 14 months. And then it blew up under his leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn’t know what they were doing.” On the border Biden’s answers were a mess. The president appeared to suggest he would impose a “total ban” on illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border, despite three years of record annual illegal crossings since he terminated Trump’s policies. In another instance of Biden seeming to get lost in his own sentences, he said he’d “continue to move until we get the total ban on the – the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”

Trump took the kill shot: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” he responded, “and I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

At another point, Biden claimed “the Border Patrolmen endorsed me” – prompting the Border Patrol’s union to reply on Twitter/X: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”

Trump’s performance had flaws of its own of course. As usual he was hyperbolic about Biden’s failings, declaring that America has become  “hell … a Third World country” and that his opponent is a “Manchurian candidate paid by China.” He exaggerated his own accomplishments in office. And as the nation’s fact checkers were bursting to point out, there were some flat out falsehoods: in particular, it was emphatically not the case that every legal scholar in the world wanted Roe v Wade overturned and the issue of abortion returned to the states. Biden also managed to goad him with  an attack line about his having the “morals of an alley cat” into saying “I did not have sex with a porn star,” a line which is likely to remind voters of their doubts about his character.

But overall, these were minor defects. Ironically, the mic-muting rules demanded by the Biden campaign ended up playing to Trump’s advantage, making him comparatively disciplined and cogent by default: unable to talk over Biden or go off on rants, both of which are kryptonite to swing voters, he had to let the incumbent’s cognitive decline speak for itself. Trump also wisely returned to border security – his best issue and Biden’s weakest – relentlessly. He also did a pretty good job reassuring America’s remaining undecideds on some of his more vulnerable flanks, such as by insisting that he would not end the war in Ukraine by simply accepting all of Putin’s terms and by ruling out a federal ban on abortion pills. Most important, however, he looked and sounded robust. Although he’s only 3 years younger than Biden, last night it seemed more like 20. He made sure to underscore the contrast with a direct attack on the President’s age, after several comments about his speech being difficult to understand: “He’s not equipped to be president. You know it and I know it. It’s ridiculous.”

We’ll have to give it a week or so to see how the debate shows up in the polls to be sure, but based on the immediate reaction, America agreed: Trump was indisputably the night’s winner. Election betters certainly thought so: Joe Biden’s likelihood of winning the election deteriorated significantly among them after the debate. Election Betting Odds, a website that averages live odds from several betting markets, now shows Trump with a 59.7% chance to win, up 4.1% in the last 24 hours. The same average shows Biden's chances cratering to 21.2%, a nearly 15 point drop overnight. Another market tracker, Oddschecker, reports that prior to the debate Biden had a 38% chance of remaining in office. But following last night’s debate he is now 4/1 to win, which implies he’s only got a 20% chance of prevailing in November. Trump’s chances improved dramatically: according to AKBets he’s now got a 62% chance of returning to the White House compared to a 46% chance of winning just last month. PredictIt.org, an election betting website, likewise showed shares predicting that the Democratic incumbent will win re-election dropped 15 points in the aftermath of Biden's debate performance:

As for the Democratic political class, their pre-debate “freakout” turned into full-blown hysteria. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod admitted that many Democrats felt “shock” at how President Biden looked at the beginning of the debate. On CNN's panel, John King went further: “This was a game-changing debate,” King began. “There is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party – and they're having conversations about what they should do about it.”

But it is unclear what they can do about it at this stage, at least without Biden’s agreement. It’s clear for all to see that that it’s politically suicidal for them to continue with him as their candidate. It is equally undeniable that the White House has covered up the extent of the President’s physical decline, and that even if he improbably secured a second term, he would be incapable of making proper decisions. That would be a disaster for the United States, and the West. But any move to replace him from the ticket would be extremely difficult, and require Biden himself deciding to drop out from the race. As I noted at the outset, this was the first time there has ever been a debate before the convention, which makes the idea of swapping Biden out for another candidate seem more feasible than if he was already formally nominated. But he has almost all of the pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention because of state primaries he has already won. Those delegates must vote for Biden on the first ballot unless he withdraws beforehand. So, no matter how shocked and dismayed party greybeards were by his performance, unless they (or, more likely, his family) tell him it’s time to go, it seems highly unlikely that Biden will agree to step aside as the Democratic candidate. In which case, barring a colossal upset between now and November, this election is all but over, and Trump has very likely won it.