The second US presidential debate will take place tonight at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and will be hosted by ABC News. In quite an unusual—and unprecedented—turn of events, the participants of the second debate will not be the same as in the first one. As our readers most likely know, President Joe Biden was pressured to drop out of the race by his own party after a poor debate performance against President Trump. He was replaced by his Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Thus, the old view of the lack of significance of presidential debates in recent elections has been debunked in this cycle.
However, it took a conspicuously awful, embarrassing performance from Joe Biden to do that. In the CNN debate back in June, it was not the substance of President Biden’s remarks that were the issue. Not that there was nothing to criticise in terms of substance, but it was overshadowed by the sitting POTUS’s complete lack of coherence and mental acuity on full display in front of tens of millions of viewers.
Are either of the candidates on stage going to give such a complete embarrassment of a performance tonight?
That is unlikely. President Trump is a lot closer in age to Joe Biden than Kamala Harris. He is 78 years old, while Vice President Harris is 59 (she will turn 60 just a couple of weeks before the election). However, he has spent the last few months appearing on popular podcasts—such as Impaulsive hosted by Logan Paul, This Past Weekend hosted by Theo Von, and the Lex Fridman Podcast hosted by Lex Fridman—where he had off-the-cuff conversations with the hosts for about an hour each time, broadcast live, garnering millions and millions of views.
‘Harris is currently leading the national polling aggregate by RealClearPolitics, up by 1.2 points over Trump’
Harris, on the other hand, has been reluctant to give any interviews, despite the vast majority of the mainstream media giving very favourable coverage to her. The one press sit-down she had was with CNN. It was an edited interview, cut down to 18 minutes; and CNN refused to release the unedited version.
There are some advantages, however, that Vice President Harris has over Joe Biden coming into her debate: Harris is currently leading the national polling aggregate by RealClearPolitics, up by 1.2 points over Trump.
However, even that may not be that great of news for her. In the last two election cycles, President Trump was vastly underpolled; and he does not even need to win the popular vote to win the Electoral College. What’s more, the highly regarded New York Times/Siena College poll released over the weekend shows President Trump with a one-point lead, which expands to two points when other candidates are included. Two other major polling firms, Harvard-Harris and Pew Research, have released two national surveys with tied results. All national polls show a recent shift towards Trump since September, which is not surprising, given that candidates tend to poll higher than they do on election day shortly after their party’s convention. The DNC concluded on 22 August in Chicago, Illinois. This is also reflected in the betting odds. President Trump is back to being the favourite with all major bookmakers.
Also, ABC News has been partnering with Ipsos for polling in this election cycle. Ipsos has been the most favourable to Democrats this year. They were the only firm that was willing to publish a national poll with Biden in the lead in the aftermath of the last debate. ABC News and Ipsos have also put out a poll recently with Harris up nationally by four points. That is not an outrageous outlier. However, when it came to candidate favourability, they ‘measured’ Trump at -22 points while they gave Harris +3… So, if Ipsos is conducting the post-debate poll on who won, it is almost guaranteed that they will find a way to make Kamala Harris the winner.
However, that will not necessarily reflect the public viewpoint. Donald Trump has a lot larger following on social media than Kamala Harris, so he will have a better opportunity to spin the narrative in his favour after the debate.
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