The debate that wasn’t

By the halfway point of tonight’s debate, it was clear that the headlines were going to be: “Biden is washed up. The party is going to look at replacing him. Democrats are doomed!” It was also clear what the impact of this debate was going to be on the election: none.

How can I say that? For one thing, I don’t live inside the cable news vortex, where people on TV spin everything that happens as a totally doomsday thing while speaking to you in an earnestly rehearsed stately voice so they can keep you tuned in for as many hours as possible. I don’t watch MSBNC or CNN. I don’t read the political news outlets that craft every article with the intent of getting quoted on MSNBC or CNN. And I don’t follow the Twitter pundits who craft every tweet with the intention of getting booked on MSNBC or CNN. Instead I try to pay attention to facts, logic, and the real world.

Biden has spent the past month gaining in the polls and taking a narrow overall lead. The cold hard reality is that if Biden had been at his finest tonight (he was instead plagued by a severe cold), he could have expanded his lead, but that didn’t happen. Instead this was a debate in which neither Biden nor Trump scored any real points.

More succinctly, there’s not a single person who went into this debate with one voting intention and came out of it with a different voting intention. There’s no one who’s going to say “Well I was going to vote for Biden in order to stop the evil unhinged Trump, but now that Biden has a cold, I no longer think stopping Trump is important.” Nor did anyone with questions about who to vote for come out of tonight’s debate with any answers.

In other words, nothing changed in the real world. Biden was ahead by a point or two in the polls before this debate? And zero votes were changed as a result of this debate? Okay, so Biden will still have the same slight lead coming out of the debate. It’s simple logic. It’s correct. And no amount of cable news fantasy land performance art is going to change the validity of what I just said.

Still, you just know that if five new polls come out over the weekend and Biden is ahead in four of them and Trump is only ahead in one of them, the entire media (including your “friends” at MSNBC) will latch solely onto that one poll that has Trump ahead, and hold it up as supposed proof that the debate hurt Biden. Remember, the political media decides what the story is going to be, based on whatever it thinks will have the most ratings impact, and then cherry picks things out of context in order to support what it’s already decided the story is going to be.

I’m telling you that, for all the endless hyperventilating you’re about to hear on MSNBC and CNN (and from the people on Twitter who are parroting MSNBC and CNN in the hope of getting booked for guest spots on MSNBC and CNN), the impact of this debate on the election will be zero. It’s not the outcome I wanted or hoped for. I was hoping Biden would use this debate to pull further ahead, and that didn’t happen. But to claim that this debate will hurt Biden is just… utter nonsense. And the people who are saying this on TV know better.

Remember when President Obama got blown out in the first debate in 2012? Everyone on TV spent a week putting on the defeatist performance art of a lifetime, and everyone at home stared at their screens for that week in a panicked haze. And then the impact of that debate on the election ended up being zero. Biden did better tonight, in comparison to his opponent, than Obama did in 2012. It didn’t matter then and it won’t matter now.

Yes, a debate line can deliver a knockout blow in an election. “Will you shut up man” was the turning point of the 2020 election. But most debates simply don’t have such moments. This debate didn’t have any memorable moments at all. It’ll have no impact. Cable news will do its doomsday fantasyland thing, and that’ll have no impact either. Meanwhile we have a close election to win. Let’s turn off the TV and put our focus into fighting and winning.

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