I do believe the reports that Biden had a cold last night, his behavior was uncharacteristically weak. I also think that whoever timed his DayQuil or whatever really did a poor job. Layer up enough caffeine and OTC medicine and you should be able to land a plane, let alone debate that lying POS.
I also think Biden over-prepared. I think his team wanted to show off his acuity by having him memorize a bunch of numbers, but that shit's bad for his stutter and he always takes pains to correct himself when he misspeaks, which makes him seem less-there than Trump, who never backtracks.
Some of Biden's worst missteps were from over-rehearsing his responses, which had him doing stuff like responding to criticisms Trump hadn't made *yet.* They all expected Trump to go in on immigration fast, and so Biden's memorized rebuttals were built around that.
I think we all got a little too hopeful that Trump's brain was just gonna start leaking out of his ears, and that Biden was going to go full Dark Brandon with the insults, neither of which was ever truly likely. Trump always performs at about this level, and Biden always holds back out of decorum.
Debates don't tend to matter, statistically - Obama was said to have lost some of the debates to Romney, for example - but there's some promising indicators anyway. Univision's focus group of latino voters, for example, all went heavily Biden because they pegged Trump's confident lies as lies.
Biden's going to end up giving a great speech at the convention, I'm sure. And he'll do better in the next debate, because it's statistically impossible he could do worse.
