It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.
In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.
“Make my day, pal,” Biden said in a video, challenging his predecessor and rival to a high-stakes showdown. Trump, who had been insisting for months he would debate Biden “anytime, anyplace”, quickly accepted the offer: “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!”
The arrangement jolted a general election campaign that had begun to feel stagnant. And if their plans hold, Americans will be treated to a presidential matchup far earlier than usual – before either candidate will have formally accepted his party’s nomination.
“The candidates realize the value of the debates, especially given their ages,” said Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan. “They need to show that they have the stamina to debate for 90 minutes or two hours to reassure the country.”
The decision to square off at least twice before the November election reflects a careful calculation by both candidates who believe televised confrontations will help magnify the other’s weaknesses.
Trump has repeatedly cast the 81-year-old president as greatly diminished. At his rallies, Trump, just four years the president’s junior, often mocks Biden as confused in an exaggerated impersonation that draws laughter and applause.
But Democrats argue that Biden can more easily draw a contrast with Trump and remind voters why they rejected his Republican rival in 2020.
“We need voters to see Trump 2024 with their own eyes,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg wrote on Thursday, “a candidate who is far more extreme and dangerous; whose performance is far more erratic, wild, impulsive and disturbing.”
Biden is clearly eager for an opportunity to change the trajectory of the race, which has remained largely unchanged despite the start of Trump’s criminal trial in New York, a brightening economic outlook and tens of millions of dollars in advertising touting the president’s record and blaming Trump for the wave of unpopular abortion bans.
While both campaigns are bracing for an extremely close contest in November, a series of recent New York Times/Siena College surveys found Biden trailing Trump in five of six critical battleground states.
Widespread discontent over his handling of the economy, immigration and Israel’s war in Gaza have hurt the president’s standing with key Democratic constituencies, particularly young people.
Even in a polarized media environment, presidential debates remain the “SuperBowl” of politics, Kall said, offering candidates what is likely to be the most prominent platform of the election cycle. For both Biden and Trump, the events are high-risk, but also potentially high-reward.
“Everyone is expecting the election to be decided by half a dozen states. Those states will be decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes,” he said. “So a debate that 70 or 80 million people watch could certainly change enough votes to matter.”
In 2020, Biden and Trump’s first face-off drew 73 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, while Trump’s debate against the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 captured 84 million viewers.
Many more Americans will not watch the events live but will pay attention to reactions on social media.
“A lot of people who don’t tune into the actual debate will likely know what the breakout moments of the debate are,” said Yanna Krupnikov, professor of communication and media at University of Michigan. “What happens afterward is going to be really, hugely important.”
Americans are arguably more familiar with Biden and Trump than any pair of presidential challengers in American history. Voters may still tune in to hear what the president and former president have to say about major issues, such as the Israel-Hamas war. But Emily Van Duyn, an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who specializes in political communication, expects most will be watching for how the candidates perform.
“For the most part, it’s going to be an assessment of: can these dudes hold up?” Van Duyn said.
Democrats say Biden must deliver an energetic performance that reassures voters unsure whether the oldest president in American history is up for a second term.
“The debate is the hurdle he has to cross,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said on CNN. “He needs to dispel that notion in that debate.”
Voters tend to express fewer concerns about the 77-year-old former president’s age, but Democrats believe a debate could highlight Trump’s tendency toward verbal slips and gaffes.
He is also likely to be pressed on his criminal cases. By then, the Manhattan hush-money case should be finished. Polls suggest a sizable share of Republican and independent voters would be uncomfortable voting for a candidate convicted of a felony.
The format poses different challenges for each candidate.
Trump feeds off the energy of a crowd. CNN has said its debate at the network’s Atlanta studios will take place without an audience, which was a prerequisite for the Biden campaign.
Trump turned off voters in 2020, when he repeatedly hectored and interrupted Biden during their first debate. “He needs to play to the voters that may like his policies but not his temperament,” Kall said.
Biden, meanwhile, has built a political brand around defying expectations, as he did earlier this year with a rousing State of the Union speech and in the 2020 debates.
. “People will say he can’t do it, it’s too late at night,” Kall said. “Then as long as he doesn’t fall down or forget something, people will say he did OK.”
The terms of the campaigns’ agreement, which bypasses the non-partisan commission that has hosted presidential debates for more than three decades, was designed to ensure a head-to-head between Biden and Trump.
In a tweet, Robert Kennedy Jr, the independent candidate for president who is unlikely to qualify for the CNN debate, accused the frontrunners of “colluding” to exclude him. “Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy,” he said.
While jumpstarting the debate season creates an opportunity for an early reset, it also makes the events less “existential” for the campaigns, said Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America, discussing the development on his podcast with the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
After the September debate, there are still weeks to recover from a potentially subpar performance or embarrassing gaffe. Though momentum from a strong showing could fade before election day, early voting means millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots.
Psaki said the back-and-forth between Biden and Trump this week was part of a new approach. Whereas four years ago, Biden led with sophisticated appeals to democracy and civility, he’s now playing humor as a way to tweak his famously thin-skinned opponent.
“It’s figuring out how to land the best needles,” Psaki said.
In a sign of Biden’s more pugnacious approach, the president opened public negotiations over the general election debate on Wednesday, the one day a week Trump is not confined to a New York courtroom. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said in the video, suggesting a date for their face-off. His campaign is now selling merchandise that read: “Free on Wednesdays.”
On Thursday, Biden’s re-election campaign also announced that it had accepted an offer from CBS News to participate in a vice-presidential debate and proposed two dates for that fall after the Republican national convention in July. Trump has yet to choose his running mate, but a carousel of Republican hopefuls have been openly auditioning for the role.
With just weeks before the first debate, both candidates have an abbreviated timeline to prepare.
Neither has participated in a debate since their final showdown in 2020. This year, Trump declined to take part in the Republican primary debates and Biden as the incumbent faced only nominal challenges.
In an MSNBC interview this week, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, insisted that the debates still mattered to voters and predicted a “huge audience” would tune in for the spectacle.
As far as what they would see, Romney quipped: “the image that comes to mind is those two old guys on the Muppets”.
