Trump aims to upend 2020 race in final debate while Biden seeks to do no harm

WASHINGTON (SBG) — President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are set to meet for their second and final debate Thursday night in what organizers hope will be a less chaotic and more substantive clash than their last encounter.

The event, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker at Belmont University in Nashville, will be structured similarly to the first debate, with six 15-minute segments. The planned topics are: "Fighting COVID-19," "American Families," "Race in America," "Climate Change," "National Security," and "Leadership."

After the previous debate in September was marred by constant interruptions and violations of rules, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced earlier this week that each candidate’s microphone would be muted while the other delivers a two-minute answer at the start of each segment. They will both then be able to speak freely during the discussion portions that make up the bulk of the debate.

“They didn’t go the full Monty of giving the moderator discretion to cut mics at any time,” said Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan.

Biden said Tuesday that muting the microphones is a “good idea” and could help foster a more policy-oriented debate. The Trump campaign has complained about the change, claiming it demonstrates the debate commission’s bias against the president, and Trump has attacked Welker’s impartiality, as well.

The debate comes less than two weeks before Election Day, with about 40 million votes already cast across the country, but it is not too late to potentially have a significant impact. Biden enters the debate leading comfortably in national polls and ahead in most battleground state surveys, but Trump recovered from similar deficits in 2016 and there are lingering doubts about how reliable public opinion polls are.

A debate scheduled for last week was canceled after President Trump balked at participating in a virtual format amid concerns about his coronavirus diagnosis, and the two candidates participated in dueling town halls on competing networks instead. That leaves the president with only one more chance to make his case to an audience of tens of millions.

“He needs to totally change the focus of the race and get everybody’s attention off of coronavirus, which is probably his most vulnerable issue,” Kall said.

He highlighted the recent vice presidential debate as a template for how Trump might change his style. Vice President Mike Pence still delivered harsh and sometimes dishonest personal attacks, but he devoted much of the debate to contrasting the Trump and Biden agendas and reminding voters of the nation’s pre-pandemic prosperity.

“This debate is the final appeal for both candidates to get their messages out to a large section of voters,” said Joshua Bolton, a political communication expert at Salisbury University. “The final debate will be a chance to make a closing argument as many voters decide whether or not to vote.”

Trump aides have reportedly encouraged the president to interrupt Biden less this time, hoping the former vice president will make mistakes if he is allowed to speak more extensively. Biden has a long-standing reputation for verbal gaffes, but Trump’s errors have often overshadowed his.

Biden’s goal is simply to avoid any major missteps that could endanger his lead. The race has been relatively stable throughout a tumultuous year and voters like and trust him more than Trump, so he just has to maintain the status quo.

“Biden needs to do no harm,” Bolton said. “If he can have a similar performance to the first debate, he should be able to come out relatively unscathed.”

The Trump campaign has made clear the president intends to confront Biden about reporting by The New York Post about his son Hunter’s emails and foreign business activities. Republicans allege the emails show Biden was more involved in his son’s business than he has publicly acknowledged, and Trump has demanded the attorney general investigate Biden for unspecified crimes as a result.

Biden could face questions Thursday about whether he took meetings with his son’s business associates and whether Hunter took payoffs from China on his behalf, as some of the emails appear to suggest. Democrats have questioned the veracity of the documents, which were purportedly retrieved from a laptop Hunter left at a Delaware computer repair shop.

Focusing too much on the convoluted story could be a mistake for Trump, Kall warned. Unlike in 2016, when Trump effectively zeroed in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, the Hunter Biden story is difficult to explain in brief soundbites and the former vice president’s alleged involvement is tangential.

“I don’t think it’s his best argument, I don’t think it should be his closing argument, and just looking back at the first debate, it didn’t work He’d be much smarter to stick to more favorable political terrain,” Kall said.

Trump brought up Hunter Biden repeatedly during the first debate, but his attacks never got much traction. Biden effusively defended his son and cited a Republican-led Senate probe that found no evidence Hunter’s business dealings impacted his father’s foreign policy decisions.

“Biden seemed to handle critiques of his son’s life well in the first debate and would be best served to respond in a similar manner in this debate,” Bolton said.

The Biden campaign has said relatively little about the emails, slamming the credibility of the reporting and denying wrongdoing but not commenting on specific documents. Biden addressed the controversy personally for the first time in an interview with WISN Tuesday, calling the allegations “garbage” propagated by the president’s “henchman” Rudy Giuliani.

“It's the last-ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family,” Biden said.

At the debate, Biden could easily turn the question back on the president, pointing to the Trump family’s controversial overseas business ties, foreign governments making payments to Trump properties, and other concerns about the Trumps profiting off the White House. A report in The New York Times Tuesday that Trump has a Chinese bank account and spent a decade pursuing business projects there might also undermine the president’s attacks.

“President Trump has vulnerabilities of his own,” Kall said.

Still, Bolton suggested there could be some benefit for Trump in bringing up the Hunter Biden emails. He needs to reassure and motivate supporters who might be discouraged by his sagging poll numbers and are likely following the story more closely than other voters.

“The attack might help energize Trump’s base by drawing attention to an issue many Trump supporters feel hasn’t been paid enough attention to by the media,” he said.