What Biden Needs To Be Ready For When Debating Trump

 For a couple of weeks now, I've been preparing my thoughts on what Joe Biden needs to do heading into Tuesday's first debate.  Plenty has changed in the two weeks since I first began musing on the issue.  For one thing, the Presidential election that had been credibly branded as the most important election of our lifetimes has just become decidedly less important.  

The issue that was making it so important was the desperate urgency of keeping Donald Trump from putting another right-wing jurist on the Supreme Court and thus consolidating a far-right supermajority on the Court for at least a generation.  The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decision to put her ego above the national interest back in 2013 when she already had cancer yet refused to call it a career at age 80 just condemned the nation to minoritarian tyranny for the rest of most of our lives.  Rather than having her successor appointed by Barack Obama and confirmed by 55 Democratic Senators as would have happened if she'd retired in 2013, Ginsburg will now be replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, her diametric ideological opposite, and there's nothing anybody on the left, center-left, or center can do about it, including whoever is elected President on November 3, 2020, other than watch nearly every progressive victory of the last century get ripped to shreds.  And any progressive agenda passed by a hypothetical President Biden and a progressive Congress will be tossed out with prejudice by a Supreme Court that has assumed a role of super-legislature in the past generation, simply negating public policy it doesn't like and inventing constitutional precedent to do so.  And any hope of John Roberts serving as a veto against the excesses of the remaining conservatives will be squelched with Barrett as the fifth vote accompanying four other Federalist Society-approved right-wing hard-liners.

There's chatter about a post-election power grab by Democrats to kill the Senate filibuster, add DC and Puerto Rico as states to stack the Senate with four more Democratic Senators, and even stacking the Supreme Court with four more liberal justices to overrule the existing conservative supermajority.  I'm highly skeptical, especially on the latter.  Before any of that can happen, Joe Biden has to be elected President by a strong enough margin that Trump and the Court are unable to steal it, and the bar for that threshold keeps rising by the day.  Secondly, the Democrats have to win the Senate.  I give them a tick better than 50-50 odds of getting 50 seats, which would be a majority if Biden becomes President, but additional seats beyond 50 are gonna be much harder to come by.  If absolutely everything went the Democrats' way in battleground Senate races as it did in 2012, one could imagine the party with 54 Senate seats going into next year, but the odds are long for this.  

And only in that scenario could I imagine the party putting forward the united front that would be necessary to move forward with such a power grab.  There are simply too many Democratic Senators who are either too respectful to the traditions of the institution or else too nervous and timid about taking on a power play that dramatic, even in the face of their policy program being crushed by an activist right-wing judiciary.  Some Senators, like West Virginia's Joe Manchin, have regionally specific justification for NOT wanting an overly left-leaning judiciary if it means upholding environmental rules that could jeopardize his state's coal industry, as one example.  And plenty of others looking at re-election in 2022 would be intimidated by the inevitable 2-1 public opposition that would arise from court packing in particular.   

For some historical context, the last time an American President tried to pack the Supreme Court with ideological allies was Franklin Roosevelt.  He did this in 1937, fresh off the most sweeping re-election mandate of the 20th century, with the Democratic Party holding 74 (!!) Senate seats.  Yet even FDR didn't have the political capital to pull it off.  It's extraordinarily hard to imagine how President Joe Biden could do in the most polarized period of American politics since the Civil War what FDR was unable to do at his period of peak popularity.  With that in mind, count me as largely resigned to a right-wing judiciary upholding minoritarian tyranny for most of the rest of my life and being at best a generation away from having any practical means to counter this.

So how deflated am I about the permanent consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 2013 ego trip as it relates to the stakes of the 2020 election?  About 60%.  Most election cycles it would be more like 90%, but in 2020, there's still the considerable stakes of removing a sociopathic incumbent who is capable of anything from the Presidency, and that's no small thing.  And while polling looks favorable for defeating Trump, the die has not yet been fully cast.  The politics of the pandemic has thus far proven very favorable for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who's been able to stay out of the spotlight in a way a typical Presidential nominee would not, and serve as something of a blank slate for anti-Trump voters to cast their aspirations upon.  For the first time in the general election campaign, that will change on Tuesday night when Joe Biden is onstage with Trump.  Most Presidential election debates don't matter a whole lot, but given that this will be Biden's effective introduction to most voters as a Presidential nominee, this one matters considerably more than usual.

Based on Biden's eyebrow-raising ineffectiveness at most of the primary debates last year and early in 2020, there's some cause for concern, with entirely reasonable speculation about cognitive decline on Biden's part.  Having not mixed it up on the campaign trail and with reporters the way that most Presidential nominees have been forced to before this year, the risk is elevated that Biden could go in flat-footed.  There were some moments in the primary debates where Biden appeared as bumbling as Ronald Reagan was in his 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, which briefly reshaped that 1984 contest before Reagan went on to win in a landslide.  Biden might be ahead right now but he doesn't have the kind of margin that Reagan had in 1984 that would allow him to recover if voters interpreted he was in the early stages of dementia at the highest-profile moment of the campaign.  If voters are presented with the choice of a sociopath who they trust on the economy versus a guy they believe to be in steep cognitive decline, don't bet against enough voters flipping to the sociopath to make the race much more competitive and simultaneously endanger Democratic coattails downballot.

Tactically, Donald Trump is a lousy debater, having little interest in the issues or public policy and mostly just ineffectively filibustering any kind of in-depth conversation about the substantive matters of our time.  But what he lacks in substance he makes up for not just with the memorably nasty personal punches he lands, but also by carefully choosing his battles on issues that hits key battleground voters where they live.  He knows his opponents' weaknesses and he knows what helps turn potential voters in his own column into confirmed voters in his column.  That's a dangerous combination, particularly for a guy like Biden with a resume nearly a half-century long that's full of questionable and/or debatable choices.

Trump sagely pummeled Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries over his brother's role in the Iraq War, which even Republican voters looked at as a mistake by 2016, and it wiped Jeb! right off the 2016 nomination podium.  Expect Trump to hammer Biden hard on two generations' worth of foreign policy choices that didn't age well, with the invasion of Iraq at the top of that list.  Another specific vulnerability of Biden's is his cozy ties with the Delaware-centered financial industry, especially his largest career contributor MBNA, that led to a number of highly questionable Biden votes in the Senate, including the particularly indefensible 2005 bankruptcy reform bill.  Biden's attempts to portray himself as a populist can be punched pretty easily full of holes if Trump can draw blood on this record of allegiance to financial barons.

But the single biggest policy vulnerability of Biden's is the issue of jobs and trade agreements because it's such a hobby horse of Trump's....and because Trump knows exactly how to weaponize it for maximal electoral benefit.  Back in 2016, the consensus view was that Hillary obliterated Trump in that first debate.  On points, she certainly did, but Trump nonetheless bulldozed Hillary on the most important exchange of the entire trio of debates in the first 15 minutes of that inaugural debate, despite it going completely unnoticed by a checked-out mainstream media and political elite.  Trump connected the dots of the economic wreckage wrought by NAFTA and other trade agreements, blamed the Clintons for them directly, and then specifically cited the postindustrial ruin he witnessed on the campaign trail in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.   Hillary had no response other than to tell voters to check out her website for her jobs plan and request that the moderator change the subject to foreign policy.  It's hard to quantify how many battleground state voters Trump poached from Hillary with that exchange, but it's not controversial to say it likely won Trump the election.  It's entirely predictable that Trump will come after Biden with the same line of attack on trade policy on Tuesday night....and if Biden is no better prepared to counter it than Hillary was, then he doesn't deserve to be elected President.

There are obviously plenty of opportunities for Biden to go on offense and land his own punches against Trump, but Biden's most important priority in this race where he has an indisputable lead is to put up a strong defense against the ruthless street fighter challenging him.   Biden can't expect to phone it in, yet he can't completely lose his cool as he has in the past when Trump makes personal attacks against Biden and his family.  And Biden needs to realize his own record is full of vulnerabilities that happen to play right to the strengths of Trump's narrative.  The potential most certainly exists for Trump to squeeze enough support away from Biden to win the election, and Biden needs to be much better ready for it when it comes from Trump than he was when it came from Kamala Harris during last year's primary debate.

The Popular Vote Is Likely Settled. The Electoral College Not So Much.

 I don't live and die by the election prognostications of wunderkind Nate Silver, but he's been closer to right than just about anybody else in gaming out the last two Presidential elections.  This past week, he crunched the numbers on an issue I've long been speculating on relative to this election cycle.....the growing disconnect between the popular vote and the need for the 270 electoral votes that ultimately decide who becomes President.  The bottom line is that with the current distribution of votes nationally, Donald Trump has a historically unique advantage in the Electoral College.

Recall that in 2000, Al Gore beat George Bush in the popular vote by approximately 0.5%.  Even though the Electoral College outcome was different, Bush's victory over Gore was in the same general ballpark, an advantage of 0.6%.  Fast forward 20 years later and the divergence has decidedly grown, according to Silver's calculations.  If Biden managed a 1% popular vote win over Trump this year, Silver gives Biden only 6% odds of becoming President.  Six percent!  A Biden popular vote of 1-2 points would give him only 22% odds of victory.  Even a 2-3 point Biden popular vote victory would give him only 46% odds of victory.  Let that sink in.  Biden could beat Trump by 3 points in the popular vote, even more than the 2 points Hillary won by in 2016, but Trump would still be more likely than Biden to be re-elected.  If Biden won by 3-4 points, his odds to win the Electoral College climb to 74%.  But that's still an amazing number.  Biden could win the exact same comfortable and decisive popular vote margin that Obama won in 2012, but still would have a 26% chance of losing to Trump in the electoral vote count that picks Presidential winners and losers.  Even with a 5% popular vote victory by Biden, Trump would still have an 11% chance of being re-elected.

How is this possible, any sane person would ask?  At the onset of a historical realignment of party affiliation, Republicans have an electorally ideal distribution of votes for Presidential elections.  It's the same reason Trump won a decisive 306 electoral votes in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by three million votes.  Democratic votes are concentrated in heavily populated coastal states while the swing states are dispersed throughout Middle America, and if they break narrowly in the GOP direction as they did in 2016, it can massively skew the national outcome.  Since 2016, there's some indication this distribution has grown even more favorable for Republicans, at least for the time being, because of the aforementioned realignment.  Several large red states are becoming more competitive while long-standing blue states are trending Republican.  

The most terrifying scenario for the Biden campaign is continued rightward trends in some combination of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, leading to another scenario where Trump ekes out narrow majorities in most of them, while ekeing out equally narrow victories in some large red states moving away from him like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, all while holding the perennial swing state of Florida.  In a worst-case scenario, Biden could win the popular vote by a full 6 points and still not become President if the vote distribution in six of those eight states fall in Trump's direction.  You can call that a warped perversion of a democratic election and I wouldn't disagree, but it's the system we got and it will be respected if it plays out that way.

This GOP Electoral College advantage is something of a historical anomaly and probably won't last for long, but there's no reason to doubt it will work to the continued advantage of the luckiest man in American political history, Donald Trump.  This is a guy who avoided a war with Iran only because the retaliatory missile Iran intended to use against America for a military attack hit its own passenger plane instead, as just one example of an unthinkable streak of luck the incumbent President has maintained.  Betting against him is a fool's errand.

So how likely is this scenario of a wide chasm between popular vote and electoral vote?  It's still probably odds-against, but the chances seem a bit larger every day.  Even Trump's people quietly acknowledge they have no chance at winning the popular vote barring a massive game changer, but there's some indication that polls are tightening in key battleground states, and that the remaining undecided voters look pretty Trump-friendly from a demographic standpoint.  Under normal circumstances, undecided votes tend to break heavily against an unpopular incumbent President, but the country hasn't been as tribalized as it is today in nearly 150 years, so when most undecided voters are noncollege whites who voted for Trump in 2016, it's a decent bet that more go Trump than not.  If you couple that with the likelihood that state polling is undercounting support for Republicans, as has been the case in the last three cycles, and you can start to cobble together a scenario where Trump can still win, possibly with relative ease if everything breaks his way as it did last time.

I concur with Nate Silver's arithmetic that the odds of this are about 25%.  Biden still has a lead in most battleground states, enough to get him over 300 electoral votes if they hold.  But so did Hillary.  Biden tends to be at or above the 50% threshold in many of these polls in a way that Hillary wasn't, but that's not to say he can't lose a couple points of that support....or that polls are overstating it by a couple of points.  Both parties tend to be pretty confident going into election night how things are gonna go, but it doesn't go entirely according to script very often.  The exception was 2008 where state and national results were pretty much perfectly in line with pre-election polling, but polling has gotten harder since then with the disappearance of land lines, a sharply declining response rate from callers, and the rapid shift of partisan allegiance between college-educated voters and noncollege voters.  I, for one, am going into this election night expecting pretty much anything, with very little confidence that I have the American electorate figured out, and I doubt anything that happens in the next seven weeks will change my thinking on that.