Thursday’s debate offers President Biden’s best chance yet to convince skeptical voters that he’s prepared to stay in the White House for another four years, with his approval ratings stubbornly low and concerns about his age lingering.
It’s a key moment for Biden, who is narrowly trailing former President Trump in the polls in several key battleground states. On the CNN debate stage in Atlanta, Biden will need to make the case that he is the better choice in November’s election while delivering an energetic speech, seizing the issues and avoiding gaffes that could set his campaign back.
Biden and his team appear to understand the importance of facing Trump, having spent the seven days leading up to the showdown holding strategy meetings and mock debates at Camp David.
Michael LaRosa, who served as First Lady Jill Biden’s traveling press secretary during the 2020 campaign, argued that the president will be judged by others on his visual and verbal presentation, not on content.
“Unfortunately, he will be judged by the media, pundits and above all voters on more superficial criteria. His agility, demeanor, physical presentation, fluency, tact and ability to counterpunch will be the hurdles he will have to clear. All of these factors will be analyzed more than his record or number of accomplishments,” LaRosa said.
Fitness to run is likely to be a major issue for both candidates, with Biden turning 86 at the end of his second term and Trump turning 82. Both men have been known to get confused and stutter in recent months.
But the poll shows voters are more concerned about Biden. CBS News/YouGov Poll A survey conducted this month found that 50% of voters said Trump has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared with 35% who said the same about Biden.
The president and his team have tried to counter those concerns by pointing to Biden’s record during his first term, arguing that he has the wisdom and experience to handle the job and using jokes to soften attacks about the president’s age.
But experts said Biden will have only so much to do to assuage voters’ concerns in the 90 minutes he takes on stage on Thursday.
“All he can do is avoid the downside, and that’s a win,” said Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Institute for Public Policy at Syracuse University. “If he’s active and he’s engaged, that’s great, but he’s not going to walk away and say this is over.”
Biden was praised for his strong performances in both State of the Union addresses, in which he responded nimbly and fought back against Republicans who tried to silence him.
Biden also displayed unusual outrage in remarks from the White House after special counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into Biden’s handling of special dossier documents that portrayed the president as elderly and having memory problems. Biden became enraged when a reporter asked him about Hur’s references to Biden’s son, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
But a debate without a script or teleprompter is not one of those moments.
“This is really an opportunity to see the candidate in action — not just their campaign team or their consultants or people promoting certain things, but the candidate themselves in action,” said Katherine Kramer Brownell, an associate professor of history at Purdue University.
It’s clear that Biden and his aides are taking debate preparations seriously. Biden has been based at Camp David since last week, accompanied by top advisers including chief of staff Jeffrey Zients, senior aide Anita Dunn, campaign manager Mike Donilon, former chief of staff Ron Klain and Biden’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer, who played Trump in the mock debates.
Members of the Biden campaign are hoping to use Thursday’s debate to tout what they see as Biden’s greatest achievements to an audience of millions, including infrastructure investment, climate issues, international alliances and recent actions at the border.
But Biden will also have to prepare to fight back against Trump, who has a history of aggressively interrupting and irritating his opponents.
“Let’s not underestimate or forget how much these two people personally dislike each other,” former Biden senior aide Kate Bedingfield told CNN on Wednesday. “They really do dislike each other. So the tension of being on a stage together, eight feet apart, with no audience, I think that’s really one-on-one tension and it’s a bit of an X-factor.”
Republicans have suggested one of Trump’s main aims in the debate was to corner Biden for 90 minutes and force him to prove he has the stamina to keep up with the president.
“What Trump wants viewers to take away from the debate is that Biden doesn’t have the capacity, the agility or the mental acuity to serve another four years as president,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
Biden’s challenge to prove he is mentally fit for the presidency is reminiscent of President Reagan’s challenge when he ran for reelection in 1984 at age 73.
In one of the most memorable presidential debates in history, Reagan defied expectations by telling Democratic candidate Walter Mondale, “I am not going to exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience for political purposes.”
“It was an effective way to distract from larger concerns about Reagan’s age, but it was only a blip in the overall campaign. If anyone had been concerned about Reagan’s age, would that one issue have changed their mind? Not likely,” Cramer Brownell said. “People attending the debates today are going to have strong feelings about the candidates either way.”
Though Trump is just a few years younger than Biden, his allies have long argued that he has more energy and a younger vibe than the president, allowing Trump to be more aggressive and Biden more defensive ahead of a debate.
“It’s liberating not to be a sitting president,” one former Trump administration official said. “President Biden is someone with a new record of excuses in the public’s mind for failures and shortcomings on all fronts.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s allies have suggested the president’s preparations for Camp David this week should also include bracing for surprises from his political opponents.
“Is he prepared to expect the unexpected and make sure he understands what that looks like, what that sounds like, what that feels like?,” LaRosa said. “That’s the only preparation we need for a Biden presidency.”
