Biden blunders in face-off with lively Trump: 3 takeaways from the Atlanta debate
Published in Political News
Symone Sanders Townsend, a former Biden aide who is now a host on MSNBC, acknowledged that Biden’s “start was bad.”
“He improved throughout the debate, but this wasn’t the Biden allies hoped to see tonight,” Sanders Townsend wrote.
On CNN, Kate Bedingfield, another former Biden aide, concurred with the assessment.
“No two ways about it, this was not a good debate for Joe Biden,” she said.
One of the reasons the Biden campaign agreed to the historically early debate was to give the president enough time to recover in case of a poor performance. Many Democrats were already expressing an urgent need for a reboot as the debate came to a close.
They can only hope that fewer people consumed the debate, or will remember it by time voting begins.
Whereas 84 million watched Trump’s first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, viewership slid to 73 million in Trump’s first debate against Biden in 2020. Given the early summer date in the midst of vacation season, it’s unlikely Thursday night’s ratings will top either.
The next debate is more than two months away, scheduled for Sept. 10, if both campaigns agree to honor it.
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