Biden agreed to debate because he’s losing to Trump – Washington Examiner

The terms of the premature primary debate of the general presidential election are about as favorable to Joe Biden as the president could possibly demand. The debate, hosted by CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper on Thursday night, will be closed to the public and feature an unprecedented two commercial breaks. Unlike past debates that were regulated by the Commission on Presidential Debates, CNN has unilateral control of the first rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump, refusing other networks in the White House press pool the ability to cover the debate from within the arena, and the network will reportedly delay airing the live debate by at least a minute rather than the customary few seconds, theoretically granting it the power to edit or pull clips from the debate feed. And yet, Biden’s team is patently terrified. The president has been whisked away from public view for the better part of a week, bunkered down in Camp David with a debate team grilling him as though he were the unemployed outsider challenging an incumbent rather than the sitting leader of the free world. Despite Biden’s weakness in late-night spotlights like Thursday’s showdown, his team is spending $50 million on ads to build up the brouhaha before the event and brand Trump a convicted felon.

Biden’s team isn’t acting like they have high expectations for their octogenarian candidate, and given his record, he’s unlikely to surpass them. The only reason his campaign agreed to Trump’s gambit to blow off the autumn debate season in favor of this affair in Atlanta is desperation. His team is desperate to do anything to reframe the narrative because, as it stands today, Trump is clearly winning the election in a quantifiable way never seen during either the 2016 or 2020 general elections.

The polls indicate that if the election were held today, Trump would likely win both the Electoral College and the popular vote. In the swing states Trump crucially lost in 2020, he now leads Arizona by 6 points, according to his RealClearPolitics polling average, Nevada and Georgia by 4 points, and Pennsylvania by 3. Wisconsin and Michigan are virtual draws, the former of which has been all year.

According to Gallup, Biden is more unpopular than he has ever been, 24 points underwater with barely 1-in-3 voters approving of his performance. By contrast, Trump is the most popular he’s been since the start of the pandemic in April 2020, a (relatively speaking) mere 6 points underwater. Crucially for Biden, who only won 2020 with double-digit margins of independent voters, Biden’s net unfavorability is nearly twice as high as Trump’s.

Much of the downward pressure on Biden’s polling is a product of the reality that any sitting president is going to face more public scrutiny and blame for the current state of affairs. If Trump turns in an undisciplined performance and allows Biden to deflect the conversation away from America under the Biden administration and toward Trump’s personal foibles, the debate, which could very well mark the first time lower-information voters truly tune into the general election, could indeed reignite focus on Trump and put a damper on his polling.

But Trump’s comfort on the periphery of the news cycle isn’t exactly an accident either. Biden did not have to go into office and spend an extra $7.8 trillion in deficit spending, leading to a 20% increase in prices since the start of his presidency, the worst inflation crisis in 40 years. Biden did not have to give Europe the go-ahead for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and disastrously abandon our allies in Afghanistan, giving Russia the de facto green light to invade Ukraine and send geopolitics into chaos. And Biden did not have to reverse all of Trump’s diplomatic deals securing the southern border, triggering some 10 million migrants to enter the country, many of whom are here illegally.

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Furthermore, Trump is running a grown-up campaign. Unlike the leaky faucets that were the cavalcades of charlatans and narcissists in 2016 and 2020, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles have run a tight ship even with a principal under extraordinary legal pressure and limited ability to speak without complicating his criminal investigations.

Biden is running out of time to change the steady downward trajectory of his reelection campaign, and clearly he knows it. Goading Trump into relitigating 2020, Stormy Daniels, or whatever decade-old scandal could piss him off is the only way Biden could possibly redirect the conversation, and that’s why he agreed to this debate.