Joe Biden is ‘aggressively’ preparing for the first debate-stage matchup with mock sessions

Joe Biden has been aggressively preparing for the first presidential debate with mock sessions that feature a senior adviser playing the role of Donald Trump as the president forgoes formal preparation. Though his team believes the significance of the debate may be exaggerated, Biden has been consistently preparing to take on the president. Biden’s campaign has been holding mock debate sessions featuring Bob Bauer, a senior adviser and former White House general counsel, playing the role of Trump.

Bauer has not actually donned a Trump costume in line with Trump stand-ins from previous years, but he is representing his style and expected strategy. Trump will throw everything he can at Biden, bombarding him with insults and weird digressions. It is an important moment because the direction of this election has been pretty stable for a long time now and Biden needs to shake it up.

Trump and Biden are scheduled to meet on the debate stage for the first time at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. The 90-minute event moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace is the first of three scheduled presidential debates. For some, the debates represent the most important moments in the campaign’s closing days, a rare opportunity for millions of voters to compare the candidates’ policies and personalities side-by-side on prime-time television.

Trump has been trailing Joe Biden in the polls, a reality that gives the president an urgent incentive to change the direction of the contest on national television if he can.

Analysts do not expect the debates to fundamentally change the race no matter what happens, given voters’ daily struggles with the pandemic and the economy. The analysts also point to high-profile debates in past elections thought to be game-changing moments at the time but that ultimately had little lasting effect. Biden will not take the fight to Trump if he can avoid it.

But Biden is prepared to go out and make his case as to why he thinks Trump has failed and why he thinks the answers he has to proceed will help the American people, the American economy, and make United States safer internationally. Biden does not expect Trump to articulate a detailed vision for a second term. Trump does not know how to debate the facts because he is not that smart.

Trump does not know that many facts, he does not know much about foreign policy. Trump does not know much about domestic policy, he does not know much about the detail. Biden is advised to avoid direct confrontations and instead redirect the conversation to more familiar campaign themes of unity and issues that matter most to voters: the economy, health care, and the pandemic.

Arguing over facts, litigating whether what Trump is saying is accurate, is not winning to Joe Biden.

This is an opportunity to speak directly to the American people. Biden’s objective should be to speak directly to the American people, and not be pulled in by Trump. Trump has not been doing any formal preparation. Trump, instead, has maintained that the best preparation is doing his day job, particularly his frequent and often contentious interactions with reporters.

White House aides also scheduled an ABC town hall to expose Trump to real voter questions for the first time in preparation for the second debate. Some aides and allies are worried that Trump’s lack of formal preparation will lead him to fall into the same hubris trap as other incumbents in their first general election debate. President Barack Obama, for example, famously struggled in his first matchup against Mitt Romney in 2012.

But other Trump backers are confident that the president is ready to handle any tough questions or pushback from Biden. Trump is keenly aware of the power and pitfalls of live television and is acutely mindful of the power of ‘moments’ to define how a debate is perceived and that he intends to make his share of them happen. It remains to be seen how aggressively Trump attacks Biden.

Trump is also an avowed counterpuncher and will surely respond to any attacks by Joe Biden in kind.

Biden must fashion a succinct, debate-stage version of his message, draw a straight line from Trump’s personal deficiencies to his handling of the pandemic, its economic fallout, the national reckoning on race, and then explain why his presidency would be different. On September 20th 2020, Biden was accused of hypocrisy after a 2016 op-ed emerged in which he slammed Republicans for holding up a Supreme Court appointment, stating that it is the constitutional duty of a president to nominate if a vacancy becomes available. Biden was surprised and saddened to hear Republican senators said they would no longer accept a nomination because it was an election year.

Joe Biden’s words resurfaced after he blasted Trump for moving to nominate a candidate to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg. Biden claimed that the nomination should wait until after the election in 44 days. Trump hit back at Biden, calling on him to release his own list of potential Supreme Court picks and accusing him of being afraid to alienate voters by releasing the names ahead.

Shortly after Ginsburg’s death as the political battle about her replacement began, Joe Biden tweeted his opposition to Trump attempting to push through a nominee, “The voters should pick a President, and that President should select a successor to Justice Ginsburg.” In 2016, Biden hit out at Republicans that the president has the constitutional duty to nominate, the Senate has the constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent. It is written plainly in the Constitution that both presidents and senators swear an oath to uphold and defend.

That was why Joe Biden was surprised and saddened to see Republican leaders tell Obama and himself that they would not even consider a Supreme Court nominee that year.

No meetings, no hearings, no votes, nothing. It was an unprecedented act of obstruction and risked a stain on the legacy of all those complicit in carrying out this plan. In another 2016 speech broadcast, Joe Biden made his position on moving forward with a nomination in an election year clear that he would go forward with a confirmation process as chairman, even a few months before a presidential election, if the nominee were chosen with the advice, and not merely the consent, of the Senate, just as the Constitution requires.

At the time, Republican senators had refused to move forward with the vetting process for Obama’s nomination to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia’s death on February 13th 2016 opened up a vacancy to which Obama nominated Merrick Garland. Garland was never confirmed and Trump’s pick Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the court. Biden had previously said that if a vacancy opens before summer in an election year, he believed the president has the green light to pick nominees.

In the last few weeks before voters head to the polls, however, Joe Biden thought they should be held off. This has often been called the ‘Biden Rule’ after the then-Senator made a 1992 speech encouraging a Supreme Court vacancy to be pushed post-election. After rumors surfaced in mid-June 2020 that a Justice was soon to retire, Biden claimed it would create immense political acrimony to nominate too close to the election.

Despite Joe Biden and Democrats arguments, Trump claimed at a rally in North Carolina that there was still enough time to effectively vet a nominee in the 44 days left before the election.

Trump also slammed Joe Biden for refusing to release his own list of potential nominees, claiming that the former Vice President did not want to run the risk of losing far-left voters if his list was too moderate and vice versa. Trump claimed that if Biden released a list of names too moderate, he would lose the entire East Coast and lose the election. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that Biden needed to release his list to help voters to make up their minds.

Instead of telling the current president what to do, Joe Biden needed to tell voters where he stood. Being transparent putting forward lists as to exactly not just what justices would look like but what their names would be is paramount importance to the American voters. Biden needed to answer those questions before telling Trump exactly how to move forward.

Joe Biden did not want to release any names until they had been properly vetted but he would chose an African American woman. Ginsburg’s death seemed certain to stoke enthusiasm in both political parties as the election could now be viewed as referendum on the high court’s decisions, including the future of abortion rights. Democrats raised more than $71 million in the hours after Ginsburg’s death, indicating her passing had already galvanized the party’s base.

Typically, it takes several months to vet and hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, and time is short before election.

Key senators might be reluctant to cast votes so close to the election, even if Trump nominated. With a slim GOP majority, 53 seats in the 100-member chamber, Trump’s choice could afford to lose only a few. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell declared unequivocally in a statement that Trump’s nominee would receive a confirmation vote. In 2016, McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee months before the election, eventually preventing a vote on Garland.

McConnell did not specify the timing if a Trump nomination was made. But trying for confirmation in a session after the election, if Trump had lost to Joe Biden or Republicans had lost the Senate, would carry further political complications. Democrats immediately denounced McConnell’s move as hypocritical, pointing out that he refused to call hearings for Garland 237 days before the 2016 election and the 2020 election was 44 days away.

The average number of days to confirm a justice is 69, which would be after the election. But some Republicans quickly noted that Ginsburg was confirmed in just 42 days. Obama waited more than a month to nominate Garland after Scalia died in February 2016. Four GOP defections could defeat a nomination, while a tie vote could be broken by Vice President Mike Pence.

The next pick could shape important decisions beyond abortion rights, including any legal challenges that may stem from the 2020 election.

In the interim, if the court were to take cases with eight justices, 4-4 ties would revert the decision to a lower court. On September 7th 2020, Debbie George in Charlotte, North Carolina, desperately wanted Joe Biden to carry her battleground state and defeat Trump in the general election. But from what George had seen so far, Biden just was not doing enough to galvanize support among Democrats and independents to win North Carolina.

Joe Biden needed to physically address North Carolinians, rehearsed speeches in front of no one were not cutting it. George’s concerns underscored the uphill battle Biden appeared to have if he wanted to win North Carolina and its 15 electoral votes in 2020. Interviews with a number of North Carolina voters, current and former party officials, political strategists, pollsters, and politics watchers painted a picture of a critical battleground that remained within the grasp of an unpopular president, even as covid continued to ravage United States’ health and economy and protesters kept up calls for racial justice.

There were factors working in Joe Biden’s favor. Biden remained extremely popular with North Carolina’s large contingent of Black voters, a group he would need to carry with an Obama-era level of enthusiasm to win the state, and the number of absentee ballots requested by registered Democrats had soared. Polls showed Biden was also performing exceedingly well with women, suburbanites, and suburban women.

But to capitalize on those prospects, Joe Biden would need to do more than run ads and make small speeches streamed from Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden needed to be more visible. North Carolina was always going to be difficult for Biden. Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina was the only time a Democratic presidential candidate had carried it in the last 44 years. But given that both North Carolina and national polls showed that voters feel Biden would handle the covid pandemic better than Trump, many Democrats had high hopes that he can reprise that success.

With the general election entering a pivotal fall stretch, Joe Biden had increased his travel schedule. After months of holding only virtual rallies and in-person events within a short drive of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden delivered a speech in Pittsburgh and traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he met with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha police. Trump, in contrast, had a far more robust travel schedule, holding regular visits to battleground states, including numerous stops in North Carolina.

Polling showed the race tightening in North Carolina with Joe Biden leading Trump by 48.6 percent to 46.8 percent. Possibly boosting Trump, was the fact that North Carolina voters did not appear to be as dissatisfied with his response to covid as voters in other battleground states were. A poll showed that 50 percent of likely voters in North Carolina felt Biden would do better handling the pandemic, while 41 percent said they felt that way about Trump.

By comparison, polls of likely voters in Arizona and Wisconsin showed far higher levels of confidence in Joe Biden in handling the pandemic.

Trump suffered a bit of a hit in North Carolina on covid, but not nearly as big as in other states. Confirmed covid infections had surged in North Carolina. North Carolina had the sixth most confirmed cases and the fifth most confirmed deaths from covid. Despite the rise, some North Carolina Republicans who remained bullish on its staying red in 2020 said the national visibility for Joe Biden that began during the Democratic National Convention in August 2020 may actually help Trump exit what had been a brutal match-up with covid.

In addition, the Joe Biden campaign just did not have the physical presence in North Carolina that Trump’s campaign has. Since July 27th 2020, Trump or Pence visited North Carolina in person five times, including a surprise visit by both men to the scaled-down Republican National Convention in August 2020 with another trip by Trump to Winston-Salem planned. The Trump campaign had 120 paid staffers on the ground in North Carolina and made 6 million in-person and virtual voter contacts.

The Trump campaign had also blitzed the airwaves in North Carolina with millions of dollars in ads that attacked Joe Biden, in many cases misleadingly or inaccurately. Conversely, the Biden campaign, citing the pandemic, had knocked on zero doors, not just in North Carolina, but all over the United States. Instead, Biden campaign said volunteers have dropped off campaign literature at doors.

Joe Biden campaign had held hundreds of virtual events targeting North Carolina, virtually recruited more than 3,000 volunteers in the state, made over 3.5 million calls to voters in there, and is working with hundreds of organizers to engage North Carolinians. The campaign also pointed to numerous interviews with local television by Biden, as well as key surrogates, as evidence that they had a presence in North Carolina.