A Biden, Trump debate rematch brings opportunities as well as risks
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Vote and let your senators know how strongly you feel.
DONALD TRUMP: Are you going to pack the court?
BIDEN: Vote now.
TRUMP: Are you going to pack the court?
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Four years ago, the first debate between then-candidate Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump featured shouting, interruptions and insults.
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BIDEN: The question is...
TRUMP: You want to put a lot of new Supreme Court Justices. Radical left. Who is your...
BIDEN: The question is - will you shut up, man?
TRUMP: Listen - who is on your list, Joe?
SUMMERS: And while this debate is a rematch, it will look and feel a lot different from 2020. CNN is hosting the debate and has said it will mute the participants' microphones to prevent crosstalk. And there won't be an audience.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: As we know, Trump loves an audience and loves a crowd.
SUMMERS: NPR's Asma Khalid spoke about the debate on NPR's Politics Podcast.
KHALID: I think the dynamics are a bit different this time around in major part because it is Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, who's the sitting president in the Oval office.
SUMMERS: This will be the first debate for either candidate in this campaign season - Trump skipped the Republican primary debates - and it will also be the first debate in modern history where one of the contenders is a convicted felon. CONSIDER THIS - for a lot of voters, the idea of a Trump-Biden rematch is not generating much excitement. But with the candidates nearly even in the latest polls and undecided voters on the line, the debate could offer opportunities and risks. Coming up, we speak with two political strategists about what to expect. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.
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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. President Biden and former President Donald Trump will face off in Atlanta for their first debate in this election season. With the contestants virtually tied in the polls, the debate could be a chance to establish a decisive lead. But even with a close race, there's been a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate among voters. We talked to Republican strategists Doug Heye and Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, and I started off by asking Faiz Shakir if he thought the debate performance might reenergize voters.
FAIZ SHAKIR: I certainly think there is an opportunity to energize people in the negative in terms of understanding why your opponent is someone who shouldn't be the next president of the United States, and particularly in terms of Trump from Biden's perspective, to remind people of his record, the things that they abhorred about him - his character in office, the chaos, gassing of protesters, rubber bullets - all the kinds of things like that that are easily forgotten over time.
So that's certainly one thing you can do in the debate. The challenge for him is obviously to also tell a positive narrative story of what you want to accomplish in the next four years without getting bogged down too much in relitigating what has happened over the course of his presidency, because ultimately presidential elections are about the future.
DOUG HEYE: Nobody expects the debate to be a positive, happy experience. And part of that is just the direction of the country and where voters feel the country's moving, and the other part is what we've seen in recent history. So we see this 25% of voters that say that they're not happy with either of these choices. And Democrats and Republicans on their bases are enthusiastic to some extent about their pick. They're also enthusiastic against the opponent. But those 25% of voters who may be the deciders, especially in swing states, they're saying very loudly I don't want to see this movie again.
And so Donald Trump and Joe Biden are essentially going to try and say, yeah, this is the part of the movie that you don't want to see again. And what we know with Trump is that's not about policy per se. Donald Trump likes to throw sand in his opponent's eyes, and he does that very effectively. And that's where we're going to have to see because we do not know, what direction does Trump use that in?
SUMMERS: There is so much about this debate that's going to look different than all of us are used to. I mean, it's being put on by a television network, CNN, rather than the Commission for Presidential Debates. There will be no live audience in the Atlanta studio. Each candidate's microphone will be muted when it is not his turn to speak. Also, I will just point out that it is the month of June, so this debate is quite early in the election cycle. How significant for either of you is the change in the format? Does it actually matter?
HEYE: Well, I love it. And quite often in the past eight years, you know, crowds have sort of taken over debates and they've become mini rallies. And I think a lot gets lost in that process. So when I first heard that there was going to be no audience, I could not have been happier. What impact this has, I don't think we know. We hear a lot that Donald Trump thrives off of a crowd. Well, that's true, but also "The Apprentice" was filmed in a studio. And yes, it was edited and so forth, but he's very comfortable in front of a camera.
And as we saw with the State of the Union, Joe Biden can interact with a crowd as well. So I'm not sure the impact that this has. The muted microphone may make it tougher for Trump to try and do some of his distraction antics, but we know that he'll still try and do that. And having watched Donald Trump now for years, we know that just because you turn off his microphone - they have a pad of paper in front of him. Does he throw a paper airplane at Joe Biden to distract him? These are the kinds of things that Donald Trump could do. And these rule changes, positive as they may be, we just don't know what the impact is yet.
SUMMERS: Faiz, I want to ask you about this because I'm remembering back in the 2020 presidential primary, when COVID upended literally everything, including the presidential race, that debate that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders had at CNN studios down the street here in Washington, where they didn't have an audience. It didn't look anything like that. And I'm curious - I want to get your take on this. That was a completely different format, too. So did you do anything differently to prepare your candidate?
SHAKIR: Yes. You assume that the moderator in those instances has a lot more power to drive a conversation because you're really talking among three people. And the moderator is deciding whether to allow a back-and-forth to occur between the candidates or to institute really regimented, hey, hold, it's not your turn - you're going to speak. And I think that's what we were preparing - like, we wanted Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden to be engaged in a back-and-forth and knew we'd be, you know, having to deal with a moderator who is going to choose at various points and terms whether to step in and stop it or whether to allow it to continue.
And I think that's the same issue that's going to face Jake Tapper and Dana Bash here, particularly with Trump. It's much more - you know, you're dealing with an actor who in many cases isn't operating in good faith, and so you're dealing with some instances where he is going to want to control the time and what he's talking about. And the temptation of so many people who have debated Donald Trump is to litigate and decide, do I want to fact check him in real time? And that's an ever-present kind of problem and concern for a moderator and for Joe Biden.
HEYE: Campaigns - their job is to talk about what they want to talk about and make their opponent talk about what they want to talk about. And Donald Trump has that ability more than anybody else to flip that on its head, and that's the temptation that regardless of whether you're Biden or in past debates, you know, the Republicans who are running against Trump in 2016 - they all fell into that trap. It's a very hard thing to get out of because Donald Trump can be quicksand in a debate like this, and you want to stay as far away from that as you can.
SUMMERS: I want to get into some of the big issues that seem to be motivating voters' opinions this cycle, and top of mind for me, at least, are inflation, immigration and abortion. And I want to start with that last one, abortion, because it's been such a huge rallying point for Democrats who have really tried to make Trump own the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion bans in states across the country. And we've heard President Biden argue that Trump is actually taking this country backwards when it comes to equality for women. Doug, I want to put this one to you. How do you think former President Trump can effectively rebut those concerns if he can?
HEYE: Well, he's trying to right now. You know, he talks about, you know, I basically put the judges in place to overturn Roe, but now this should be decided by the states on a state-by-state basis, and that's what Republicans always believed in. Essentially, Donald Trump is trying to use nuance in this debate. And Donald Trump isn't somebody who does nuance very often, which means it's going to be difficult for him to pull off. And for Biden, this is the only issue where he's on offense. If you look at polling on issues, you know, forget the national polls of who's up a point or two on any given week. If you draw down on issues other than abortion, Biden is underwater on everything - on crime, on inflation, on the border, on health care, on education. This is Biden's only place to be on offense, and I expect that he'll do that often and, you know, as well as he can.
SUMMERS: I want to move to another topic, and that's the issue of immigration, which former President Trump has really made a key focus of his campaign really since his political rise began back in 2016. And in recent days, we have heard him blame President Biden for a surge in illegal border crossings. He has argued that Biden's policies are too lax and that Biden's approach has fueled violent crime. And I will just note here that immigrants do not commit crime at higher rates than U.S. citizens. Multiple credible studies have said that. Faiz, to you, how do you think President Biden on the debate stage might seek to use this issue, which many see as a liability for him, to his advantage?
SHAKIR: Yeah, I also tend to think that immigration is not being considered appropriately by a lot of people on the left who see it largely in the crime lens because I think it's also bled over pretty deeply into an economic issue. Generally, people are concerned in seeing cities that undoubtedly have become more difficult to manage. So I think what often ends up being missed in the immigration debate is it brings a lot of different threads together for people's lives, and to think about it simply in the terms of crime would be not meeting, I think, voters where they're at.
SUMMERS: I want to talk more about the economy because one of President Biden's big hurdles seems to be that there's this really big disconnect around the economy. The economy is improving, but many people - and I talk to a lot of these voters when I'm out on the campaign trail - they perceive that the economy is still doing quite badly. I'll throw this out there to both of you. How do you think that President Biden can make this issue a winning one for him, given that, as the person in the White House, his administration is being held responsible for the state of the economy and the way that people perceive it?
HEYE: What Biden does in response is what we've seen a lot of, a litany of I passed this bill and that bill, and I have a great legislative track record. The American people do not care about Joe Biden's legislative track record. They care about going to the grocery store and what it costs. They care about the fact that going to a fast-food restaurant is now viewed by an increasing number of Americans as a luxury. He has to understand that voters are feeling pain right now, and if he can't demonstrate and empathize on that issue and just goes through a litany of his accomplishments, he loses them.
SHAKIR: To add on to what Doug is saying, I would say, what is the story I want to tell Americans about this economy? That's the challenge for Joe Biden. And what I would proffer is that where he's fighting Donald Trump on political authoritarianism - we don't want authoritarians in charge of our political system who write the rules and discount the votes of regular people. That's also what I'm fighting for on the economy. I want economic democracy, which means that people have power, not authoritarians of our economy. That's why I fight for workplace democracy, which is I go on the picket lines and I stand with workers. I fight for noncompete bans so that workers are free to move and demand better wages. That's a story, right? That's bonding all of this together so that people understand all of these scatter-plot points that you've given me.
SUMMERS: Doug, I will ask you to take us to the debate briefly. What would a good performance for former President Donald Trump look like?
HEYE: One where he prosecutes the case on why Biden would be wrong for the next four years, and that really ties down to two issues, and that's costs and prices - not inflation. Inflation is a statistic that people in Washington, D.C., use, and then they use words like transitory. Americans buy things, and they cost too much, and those prices aren't going down. That's one. Number two is the issue with the border. And for Trump, the benefit that he has here is that these are simple things for him to talk about. He can talk about them. They're complex issues, but he can talk about them simply.
SUMMERS: Faiz, same question to you, but for President Joe Biden. What would make a good night for him?
SHAKIR: He both sets the narrative very, very early on in the first few minutes. Here's the top one or two things I want to remind you about why we don't want Donald Trump as president, whether he's out for revenge or he's a chaos agent or he's extreme right-wing - whatever, you can pick your poison, decide this is what I want to say to everybody about Donald Trump. And over the course of that night, you're going to see. You're going to be reminded of it.
And in addition to that, the next four years, we're going to keep building on this progress. Our job's not done here. I didn't come here to tell you it's accomplished. I'm telling you I'm involved in the project to work on your behalf. And over the course of this evening, I'm going to tell you what is left to do. I've done some stuff, but I've got more to do. That's why I need another four years.
What I imagine is that you're hitting points very early on that just kind of be constantly affirmed again and again and again, as the night goes on. Whether you're talking about abortion, whether you're talking about immigration, whether you're talking about the economy, as we've discussed here, he can just hit it early and repeatedly.
SUMMERS: Last thing to both of you - can either of you envision a scenario in which what happens at this first debate in Atlanta can fundamentally change the outcome of the election in November?
HEYE: Absolutely, but only in the negative. If Biden has a home run or Trump has a home run, the game doesn't change. Especially with Biden, if there is a moment of stumble, that is going to cause those 25% of voters to think really hard about whether or not he's up to the job again. And Democrats will tell you that that's an unfair thing, but that's where those voters are.
SHAKIR: Yeah, and I think so much of what Joe Biden has been caricatured at this point has been based off of clips and morality of various things here and there. And people haven't really, quite frankly, had an opportunity to see him. Outside of State of the Union, you know, there aren't - been many big moments. Donald Trump is more ever-present, as he often is, in people's feeds and inboxes and TV sets, whereas - you know, he's been on trial and such. We've seen Donald Trump. We haven't seen Joe Biden. And this is one of the few times where he'll have a command of a large national audience to say, I can both show you in style and effect who I am, remind you of what you liked about me.
When I was talking about restoring the soul of America, it wasn't just a policy agenda. It was also just the decency and the compassion, the character that he brings to office. And I do think that's why I operate with positivity and optimism as a Democrat who supports Biden about this election because, at the end of the day, as long as he hits his benchmarks of reminding people who he is and what he is, then we're fine. People are going to be there. But to Doug's point, if somehow people start to believe that he's different than what he was four years ago, he's different than what I thought of him for the past 40 years in public service - yeah, then that's a concern.
HEYE: Another reason why this debate is really important is not that it's the first one, but it is potentially the only one. Yes, there's supposed to be an ABC debate later this year, but we don't really know that that's going to happen. Either one of these two could decide, I'm not doing this again for very legitimate reasons. So this may be the only look that voters have.
SUMMERS: That was former Republican National Committee communications director Doug Heye and Faiz Shakir, chief political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Thanks to both of you for joining us.
HEYE: Thank you.
SUMMERS: This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. And one more thing before we go - you can now enjoy the CONSIDER THIS newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org/considerthisnewsletter.
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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Juana Summers.
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