Again, the problem is: What’s the audience for a televised debate? Politically engaged people who are interested in policy details & fact checks made up their minds long, long ago. Debates are for folks who don’t follow politics and tune in at the end for a vibe check.
Trump's debate performance was awful because he lied constantly.
Biden's debate performance was awful because he seemed tired and stumbled a lot.
A problem Biden has is that a large portion of the public and media has showed they care more about presentation than facts.
There have no doubt been cycles when even highly politically engaged folks were somewhat on the fence and a debate might nudge them one way or another. This is not one of those cycles.
I agree with this, but I'm also a little worried that we've got younger/leftier voters that are waffling between "Biden" and "sit this one out", and none of this is helping sway them toward the former.
This is why I always read transcripts of general election debates and only watch the primary ones - by the general election I know enough to have made up my mind and reading is the faster way of absorbing any genuinely new policy proposals. But that means ...
... that my perception of such debates is routinely skewed from that of people who _watched_ the debate. When Obama had his first debate as POTUS, which everyone agreed he flubbed, the transcript looked fine, and only Megan McArdle, who like me hadn't _watched_ the debate ...
... had as sanguine an initial perception of Obama as I did. In this case, the transcript shows Trump lying up a storm and saying some terrible things, Biden muddling the end of a sentence about Medicare where it's still clear what he meant to say, and badly bungling calling Trump out on Roe ...
... but also looking more honest than Trump and more or less on top of facts. But it's clear from the response of many people, who aren't all part of the same NY Times editorial board, that he must have looked and sounded much worse than what shows up in transcript.
Which is why my contribution to this argument hasn't been to remark on the debate, but on the deep unseriousness of the "Biden needs to drop out and let's ignore the existence of Kamala Harris and pretend some small group of D muckimucks can just drop both candidates" part of the discourse.
