The first US presidential debate in the 2024 election season took place last night in Atlanta, Georgia on 27 June. The debate, moderated by CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and hosted by their network, was an anticipated watch for many. However, several people also doubted its level of impact on the election.
It seems, based on the betting odds alone, that the latter were very wrong.
President Biden’s odds for re-election plummeted after the debate was over.
The average chance bookmakers are now giving him is just 22.5 per cent.
CNN’s own poll, which heavily favoured President Trump’s opponents in the past, shows that more than two-thirds, 67 per cent of the viewers thought that Donald Trump had won the debate.
Even left-leaning mainstream media outlets, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, and the online publication for the host CNN itself are of the opinion that it was a terrible showing from the incumbent POTUS, who was already trailing his challenger in the polls. Evidently, this reignited the calls for him to step down and have his party replace him with another candidate before the November election.
So, now that we have talked about its impact, let’s discuss what actually happened in last night’s debate.
The interesting thing is, not much unexpected happened. The previously anticipated, obvious topics were brought up, with the candidates giving their respective usual talking points to the questions. The economy was the first topic, to which, as usual, Trump touted his ‘greatest economy in the world’ before the COVID pandemic; while President Biden tried to put the blame for the country’s economic woes on the previous administration, and boasted of the number of jobs having been created since he took office.
Despite worries from conservatives, the two CNN moderators treated both candidates reasonably equally. The topic of abortion came up next, then migration followed by foreign policy, with a focus on the ongoing Russo–Ukrainian war in Eastern Europe and the Hamas–Israel war in the Middle East.
As for the Russo–Ukrainian war, Donald Trump repeated his usual claim that the war never would have started if he had been in office, and blamed President Biden’s lack of leadership for it; while President Biden made the claim that Trump was too soft and friendly with President Putin of Russia during his presidency.
As we wrote above, neither candidate deferred from their usual talking points. If that is the case, what has gone so wrong for President Biden?
It was that he was being his usual self again,
speaking in an unsure, soft tone, slurring his words, even habitually confusing them.
Once he confused President Trump with President Putin, and stated that President Trump had invaded Ukraine. At some point, even Donald Trump remarked, ‘I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.’
So, in a sense, what elicited this seismic response from the betting markets and the media was that President Biden was being his usual self—which is not good news for him.
Even at the time of the walkout to the podiums, Donald Trump seemed confident and prideful, while President Biden looked unsure and confused. It was more a disaster for him from the standpoint of optics than content. And, as we learnt from the first ever presidential debate between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, optics matter a whole lot for presidential candidates.
Watch the First Presidential Debate Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Full Below
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