6 Questions to Keep in Mind During Tonight’s Debate - Rob Horowitz

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™

 

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Former VP Joe Biden and President Donald Trump

Here are 6 questions to keep in mind as you watch tonight’s presidential debate and the news coverage in its immediate aftermath:

 

1)  Does Joe Biden pass the Chief Executive Test?  In the era of Donald Trump, the notion that the voters make an implicit gut judgment about whether or not presidential candidates seem capable of ably handling the nation’s most important job may seen quaint or old-fashioned.  For Joe Biden tonight, however, in a race where a substantial majority of the electorate has already decided that the incumbent deserves to be fired, it is job 1.  President Trump has already given Biden a big assist in this area. By continually questioning the former vice-president’s mental acuity and spending millions of advertising dollars essentially saying he is practically senile, the president has lowered the expectations of Biden’s performance, giving him a fairly low bar to clear. 

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I agree with some pundits that suggest that Biden’s situation tonight is most reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s in 1980, where a majority of the nation had decided that Jimmy Carter deserved to be fired and Reagan only had to pass the Chief Executive Test to win. The similarities only go so far, however., Biden’s task tonight is much easier than Reagan’s was then. To date, the Trump campaign’s efforts to define Biden negatively have had little success, while the Carter campaign had somewhat effectively defined Reagan as a warmonger and a right-wing extremist, and as a result that race was still pretty much a dead heat going into the debate. Reagan had to change a relatively large sub-set of voters’ perceptions. Biden has to mainly reinforce what they already think.

 

2) Like previous presidents, does Donald Trump under-perform in debate one?  Barack Obama, George W. Bush and even the Gipper himself, all performed poorly in the first debate of their re-election campaigns.  Accustomed to the deference the office of president brings and only rarely having engaged in direct political combat over the past 4 years, they all seemed rusty and off their game. President Trump is unlikely to have this problem. He engages almost daily with media and has recently done a number of tough interviews. As a result, he will be more ready for a spirited back and forth than his predecessors. On the other hand, the president’s problem is that most voters do not like his combative and combustive style.  Even if gives a vintage Trump performance, that will not necessarily help him close the gap.

 

3)  Can President Trump keep sufficient focus on the economy?  The only major issue area where more voters prefer Trump to Biden, admittedly by a narrow margin, is the economy.  If the president is able to stay somewhat disciplined and return to that topic as much as possible, that bodes well for him.  Even better, if he is able to present some concrete ideas for how to speed up the recovery in the short-term and outlines a more long-term economic agenda he will implement if re-elected.

 

4)  Can Joe Biden keep sufficient focus on COVID-19?  Joe Biden has an overwhelming advantage over Donald Trump on which candidate voters think would do a better job of responding to the Coronavirus pandemic.   If he is able to keep returning to Trump’s failed response and its disastrous health and economic consequences and not get overly preoccupied with responding to every Trump attack, that bodes well for him. It will be even more advantageous to the former vice-president, if he can crisply outline his plan for curbing the virus.

 

5) Does President Trump double-down or walk back his repeated failure to commit to a “peaceful transfer of power?"  As he did in 2016, President Trump is once again refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, claiming the election results will be rigged against him and that there is going to be widespread voter fraud. .This time, he is doing so even more fiercely and the fact that he now has the powers of the presidency at his disposal, makes it more disturbing to the sub-set of voters he needs to peel away from Joe Biden, if he is going to win the election.  He will do himself some good if he backs off this assertion; if he doesn’t,  it will be a major part of the news coverage coming out of the debate, potentially crowding out some of his good moments. More importantly, he will have failed to ease the doubts that voters he must persuade, if he is going to come from behind and pull out a win have, about his fitness for office.

 

6) Is there a gap between polling on the Horserace and Debate Winners and Losers? Research shows that the main effect of debates is to reinforce existing candidate preferences.  If you support a candidate going into the debate, you are likely to think that a candidate won the debate. So, to measure true debate impacts, it is important to compare the post-debate polls asking who won or lost with candidates’ current standing in national polling. For example, if 60% of voters believe Donald Trump won the debate, since that is well above the 42% or so who now indicate their support for him, that is a very good night for him.  In other words, to gauge who is likely to benefit the most from their performance tomorrow night, look for the candidate whose performance as measured by the post-debate polls substantially exceeds their current percentage of the vote.  Additionally, keep in mind that as people --many who did not watch the debate closely or at all----absorb the news coverage, the perceptions of who won or lost the debate often changes markedly from the instant poll results released the night of the debate.

 

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Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

 

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