Ed Burmila: being the Calm Down guy isn’t my usual thing but people insist on conflating their own sense of how badly the debate went for Biden (it was bad!) with actual voters in the real world who were sincerely going to vote for Biden and changed their mind last night.

being the Calm Down guy isn’t my usual thing but people insist on conflating their own sense of how badly the debate went for Biden (it was bad!) with actual voters in the real world who were sincerely going to vote for Biden and changed their mind last night.

Classic “no of course it didn’t change my vote, but obviously it changed a lot of other people’s votes!” fallacy.

I think it may have increased feeling to vote against trump

Ed, I'm very gratified to come on here and see you talking obvious sense.

terminally online people catastrophising is exhausting tbh

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Yes! This.

Trump didn’t get much push back from Biden or the moderators for saying “finish the job” about Gaza, but hopefully that soundbite will stick with people. people should assume that that is his attitude toward everything.

I agree that very few voters will have changed their minds. I think the issue is that in an election that hinges on turnout (i.e. getting your voters pumped up to go vote for you), biden’s performance hurt him. Gotv or die

🧑🏻‍🦽🔵 Nursing Home v. 🤪 Insane Asylum on a golf course.

I think it’s possible that the intense dislike for both candidates means that we have an unusually large number of genuine undecideds for a modern election. Not asserting that as a certainty, but I don’t think “it doesn’t matter, everyone has made up their minds already” is a certainty either.

Big difference between “there are undecideds” and “the undecideds have now made up their mind based on a thing I saw on tv last night that was bad”

Biden’s campaign was clearly hoping for a big win last night, otherwise a June debate wouldn’t have happened at all. They got the opposite. I think it’s worth treating that as a big deal. Maybe the hyperbole should be at a 7 and not a 9 or whatever, but it’s a serious, concerning event.

Debates don’t matter. They never have.

According to polls, undecideds are mostly young, minority, low-propensity, and most likely to get news from social media. They are the absolute last people who watched that debate live from start to finish. How clips from the debate go viral will matter more than anything else.

I don’t doubt that the people who watched the whole thing are mostly very decided, but as you said, that’s not where the impact is. It’s early, but so far the social media echoes of this shitshow seem pretty damn bad.

I’ve seen a mix. Trump said some crazy and offensive stuff, and the good thing about Biden being low-energy is it’s harder to make a punchy clip.

Annoying how people think in undecided when the real problem is people just won't bother.

Someone undecided on whether or not to vote at all is still undecided.

And still counted as undecided when they are saying fuck that shit.

I saw maybe 2 minutes of it as I entered my kitchen and turned off the TV in there, but I'm more annoyed by the absolute panic response online than by whatever the candidates did. It's just exhausting! I doubt this debate between two totally known quantities swayed anyone.

I've followed you for over a decade and kept telling myself similar things during the debate, but man those first 30 minutes were unlike anything I've ever seen. I suppose I haven't paid enough attention to his speeches of late but that was terrible.

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