WASHINGTON —
This week’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump won’t produce much in the way of civil dialogue over the nation’s future. It’s more likely to resemble a demolition derby, with each contestant trying to knock the other off course.
And, let’s face it, many viewers will tune in mainly for the crashes.
The question isn’t who will win that series of collisions — it’s who will lose.
Presidential debates rarely transform an election. But Thursday’s showdown could change the momentum in this year’s contest — mostly because the stakes for Biden are so high.
The president is running about even with Trump in national polls, but he’s behind in the battleground states that will determine the outcome. He’s also battling the view among many voters in both parties that he’s too old to serve effectively for another four years.
Republicans have waged a relentless campaign to stoke those doubts. Biden “can’t put two sentences together,” the former president told supporters last month. “He can’t find the stairs off the stage.”
That’s a pretty low bar for Biden to clear. Last week, Trump belatedly realized his mistake and tried to reverse course, calling the president “a worthy debater.”
“I don’t want to underestimate him,” he explained.
Either way, the 90-minute debate will give the 81-year-old president an opportunity to show that he can not only find the stairs but think on his feet as well. If Biden doesn’t visibly pass that test, his campaign will have a hard time recovering.
Trump, who is 78, faces challenges too.
In his first debate against Biden in 2020, the then-president behaved like a disruptive bully and promptly dropped four points in the polls.
A similarly chaotic performance this week in Atlanta would help revive the anti-Trump coalition of voters that fired him last time.
If Trump blunders badly — he has been known to lapse into incoherence and confuse Biden with former President Obama — he too would face renewed questions about his mental fitness.
Again, the question isn’t so much who will win but who will lose. Candidates fail in debates by stumbling more often than they triumph through brilliant wordplay.
So the stakes are high for both candidates. The incentive will be to go on the attack, to try to push the other guy toward disaster.
The debate, hosted by CNN with correspondents Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as moderators, will spare viewers the tedium of opening statements. There will be no live audience, a demand Biden’s side made after witnessing the noisy enthusiasm of Trump supporters at earlier events. Each candidate’s microphone will be silenced while the other is speaking, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2020 debate, when Trump constantly interrupted Biden and the moderators.
I asked strategists from both parties what advice they would give each candidate.