Debate Views Fell Way Below Expectations, That’s A Message

Everybody in politics is in the prediction game. That’s the nature of the beast. One prediction concerning the Thursday night debate that has gone wildly askew was the size of the viewing audience. The first 2020 Biden/Trump debate was 73 million viewers. Last night was supposed to top that by at least five to twenty million. Did it happen? No. What did happen? Dan Rather reports that 48 million people watched it, Google is saying 51 million, so let’s just split the difference at 50, shall we? That is 23 million viewers less than in 2020. What does that tell you?

I’ll say what it tells me. I think that there is an illusion of “independent” or “undecided” voters. That class of persons may have existed in some prior incarnation but not in today’s body politic. It simply is ignoring reality to suppose that such a thing exists today. Well do I recall the last debate in 2016 when Chris Wallace (idiotically, I thought) crowed about people “doing a little last minute shopping,” watching the debate he moderated on Fox News. Maybe he believed that. Maybe he is or was that naive. Nobody at that point in the 2016 election was *weighing* whether to vote for Trump or Clinton. It was a contentious, brutal, divise election and people were on one side or the other. Same with 2020. And now the same with 2024.

I think people didn’t tune into the debate last night because there was no need to — if we are defining “need” as the desire to gain information about a candidate or to be persuaded to vote for one as opposed to the other. For the bulk of the audience, I suspect, it was entertainment. It was strictly to see how much Donald Trump would lie and about what and how many haymakers Joe Biden would land in refuting Trump’s lies. And we did see that. The fact that Biden’s voice was as small as it was, due to a cold, detracted from the overall impact of his presentation. Trump had the larger voice because Trump is always the loudest voice in the room, never the sanest or the most rational, but always the loudest.

Now here’s the larger point to be derived from all this: this election is over, except for the actual voting. Yes, we will go through the traditional customs of the conventions and we will listen to Trump crow about his vice presidential candidate. And we will watch Melania not show up to any campaign events, because it’s pretty obvious that that is what is going to happen here. The two of them may be married on paper, still, but they don’t have a *marriage* in the sense that the yous and mes define that term. And never have had.

I sincerely believe that if you held the election today it would not be any different than what you’ll see in November. Think about this for a moment: we are dealing with two candidates that have already been in the White House. We lived (those of us who aren’t dead from COVID) through four disastrous years of Trump. We know exactly what to expect. Likewise, we know what Biden has done.

There has never been an election like this before. So the results of debates and polls and all that is extraneous nonsense. It truly does not matter — in my opinion. The MAGAs will vote for Trump even if he goes out and kills somebody on Fifth Avenue tonight. We all know that. They’re fine with that, not a problem in the world.

The people who voted for Biden in 2020 are going to do it again, I believe. And this overnight fantasy that we’re living in right this minute, that Biden “lost” the debate and must immediately be replaced on the ticket is pure click bait madness. It’s not going to happen. It doesn’t need to happen.

I’m not saying get complacent. My theory is that you always, always, without exception, campaign as though you’re thirty points down. But this pearl clutching, fainting couch, desperate, hysterical reaction to last night’s debate is simply that and no more. It is a reaction. It is not reality. Those of us who are supporters of Biden know his strong points and his weak and what we can expect. Nothing happened to change that.

Biden did poorly last night. He’s the first to admit it. And as Barack Obama pointed out today, these things do happen. It happened to him in the first debate with Mitt Romney. Now it is time to get back to work. We have bigger fish to fry, like Trump’s sentencing in two weeks and then the start of the Republican convention, which ought to be a “goddamn laugh riot” to appropriate a phrase from a comedy album, “We’re All Bozos On This Bus.”

As a final note, I think it is nothing short of disgraceful that everybody from the New York Times to the Atlantic and lesser literary lights have piled on President Biden like they have for last night’s debate. That highlights another issue in our culture, which is the never ending feeding frenzy of the press, as it looks for one temporary maladjustment and blows it up into a malignant political cancer, demanding immediate emergency surgery — while all the while normalizing, if not openly nurturing, the unforgivable excesses of Donald Trump. Why? Money.

Our culture is sick in many ways, or we wouldn’t have someone like Trump on the ballot of either party, to begin with. Trump is a passing phase, if for no other reason than his age preventing him from being politically active for years and decades to come. But the set up that allowed Trump to flourish is still very much with us. And that is television ruling politics to the extent that it does. That’s a related malady that needs to be addressed once the body politic is rescued from the immediate toxic influence of Trump.

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