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Thursday, October 22, 2020
By Roland Peters
It won’t be long before the US presidential elections. Before the final televised duel, Trump’s team complained bitterly: The organizers were against them. They don’t want to talk about many topics. But Trump needs attention.
When the Democrats were still on who should be the challenger to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, on November 3, there were great doubts about the steadfastness of Joe Biden. Who could do better in television matches against him? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Pete Buttigieg? After all, Biden seemed oddly absent at times and kept giving up. Against such an experienced TV Trump, as far as concern, Biden would seem old in the truest sense of the word. Democrats would reduce their chances of victory.
The opposite has happened. After Trump behaved extremely aggressively in the first television duel in late September and repeatedly slapped Biden and the moderator, the president’s polls have deteriorated significantly. Shortly after, his Covid disease became known, which can also have an effect. Biden is around 10 percentage points ahead of Trump. What worries Democrats: Even after Hillary Clinton’s first televised debate in 2016 against Trump, her lead over Trump had increased from 2 to 6 points. The end is known.
Trump’s rival, Democrat Joe Biden, is taking a calmer tone.
(Photo: AP)
The third and final television match is now before the election: Thursday night local time, Friday morning from 3 am to 4:30 am German time, the competitors will take the same stage in Nashville, Tennessee. The organizers changed the rules beforehand, mainly to control Trump a little. In an hour and a half, six topics will be discussed for a quarter of an hour each. At the beginning of each block, both candidates have two minutes to explain their position. Meanwhile, the other’s microphone is off.
Trump’s campaign team calls this shift “partisan.” However, after a few days of complaints and doubts, he announced that the president would attend anyway. At the same time, Trump complained Tuesday night during an election campaign appearance in the important state of Pennsylvania: “Nobody loves me.” “If we had not been hit by the plague,” he would not have needed to appear in the electoral campaign: “We had already won.” Despite all the criticism, Trump apparently cannot do without the attention of the latest television match. Because the debates are seen all over the country.
Unpleasant topics
Trump will have come up with something to get around the restriction. Stay in your corner, that doesn’t sound like the showman. He could just speak loud enough, or walk up to Biden (as he did in a debate with Clinton), or anything else to get the attention of the director, NBC News anchor Kristen Welker, and the audience. Who should stop it? If it still needs to be more or less regulated, the candidates want to discuss the following topics: the crown crisis, families, racism, climate change, national security and leadership.
But Trump doesn’t even want to talk about these issues, as his campaign manager Bill Stepien complained, but about foreign policy, as previously agreed. After all, everything else had already been discussed in detail in the first debate, which Trump “won against moderators Chris Wallace and Joe Biden,” he wrote in a two-page letter to independent organizers. That is not true, at the end of September the two spoke about corona and violence in the streets, among other things, but not about the rest. Stepien asked to reconsider the decision, but remains. The remainder of the letter consisted of a series of complaints against the organizers, they acted partisan and in favor of Biden’s campaign team.
On foreign policy, Trump might look a little better there than on the other issues, but there may be one thing above all in the president’s interest: using any reason, no matter how small, to point out the emails of Biden’s son Hunter. . From their point of view, they prove that their competitor is corrupt. However, it is not clear exactly what this corruption is supposed to consist of. But this tactic was already successful in 2016: With a revelation in the last meters, change the course and take the victory. Back then, it was about the Hillary Clinton emails. Even the FBI got involved just before the election date.
Not at all disconnected
Both the electoral campaign at that time and the current one show that opinions about Trump are not completely disconnected from his behavior, as he has been claiming for years. Perhaps it was this renewed perception that led the president’s election campaign team to convert the second of three planned television duels into a different format, in which Biden was not even present. But even with the guests’ questions, Trump was Trump; It is unlikely that he has convinced new exchange voters, of which there are only a few anyway.
Trump is an expert in using the medium of television for himself. But apparently there are many registered voters who do not agree with his style of discussion with political opponents. There is hardly any other way to interpret the parallel developments in the survey results. Only a minority of Americans follow day-to-day political affairs in detail: a maximum of one in five, according to a study conducted earlier this year. The rest of them are only slightly or not at all interested in what and how they argue day after day.
The first game against Biden, in which Trump experienced a collapse in his polls, as in 2016, was watched by 73 million Americans, and only on television. There are no reliable figures for laptops, cell phones, and other platforms. In the US, television is slowly but surely losing importance as a source of news – in August 2018, less than 50 percent of respondents told Pew Research that they often use television to obtain information. Social media (20 percent) and websites (33) were above this together. So it is quite possible that a few million more people saw the first debate.
All of this suggests that what is more important to voters than expected is how presidential candidates behave in debates and what issues are being discussed. Why else would Trump’s campaign team suddenly want to drop certain issues? Tens of millions more engage in television duels than in day-to-day political affairs. Next night, voters will be shown once again who they really want to vote for. And who is the alternative.
