United States elections 2024
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Yommie
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Why Biden Wanted to Debate Trump Early, and Why Trump Said Yes
President Biden, trailing in polls, is hoping to shake up the race and mitigate political risk. Donald Trump, already lowering expectations for his rival, is eager for onstage clashes.
Why Biden Wanted to Debate Trump Early, and Why Trump Said Yes
President Biden, trailing in polls, is hoping to shake up the race and mitigate political risk. Donald Trump, already lowering expectations for his rival, is eager for onstage clashes.Listen to this article · 8:39 min Learn more
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President Biden and his campaign have moved recently to focus voters’ attention on Donald J. Trump and what it would mean for him to return to power.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher
Reid J. Epstein reported from Washington, and Shane Goldmacher from New York.
May 15, 2024
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Tens of millions of dollars of advertising has not changed President Biden’s polling deficit. Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial has not altered the race’s trajectory. And Mr. Biden’s significant cash and infrastructure advantages have yet to pay political dividends.
So on Wednesday, the one weekday Mr. Trump is not confined to a courtroom, the Biden campaign shook up the race, publicly offering to bring forward the first presidential debate by three months. The move was meant to jolt Americans to attention sooner than later about their consequential choice in 2024. Mr. Biden’s advisers have long believed that the dawning realization of a Trump-Biden rematch will be a balm for the president’s droopy approval ratings.
The Trump team swiftly accepted. And Mr. Trump proceeded to do Mr. Biden the favor of lowering expectations for his performance, writing on social media that his rival was “the WORST debater I have ever faced.” The post was a preview of the insults to come, with Mr. Trump accusing the president of being unable to “put two sentences together” and calling him “crooked” three times.
The early-debate gambit from Mr. Biden amounted to a public acknowledgment that he is trailing in his re-election bid, and a bet that an accelerated debate timeline will force voters to tune back into politics and confront the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to power.
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Yet, at the same time, proposing the earliest general-election debate in the history of television is a way to mitigate the risks of placing an 81-year-old president onstage live for 90 minutes. By agreeing to two debates rather than the traditional three, the Biden campaign is limiting his exposure. By scheduling the clashes further out from Election Day, both candidates will have opportunities to recover should they stumble.
Mr. Trump, who turns 78 in June and skipped all of the Republican primary debates, has been eager to meet Mr. Biden onstage, publicly and privately casting him as diminished since 2020. Within hours of Mr. Biden’s announcement on Wednesday, both sides had publicly agreed to a debate on June 27 hosted by CNN in Atlanta and one with ABC News on Sept. 10.
There is also peril for Mr. Trump because Mr. Biden has performed well in key moments when expectations were set low for him — including the 2020 debates and his recent State of the Union addresses.
By accepting Mr. Biden’s deal for two debates, Mr. Trump lost almost all his leverage to demand more, even as his campaign asked for monthly contests and Mr. Trump said he had accepted a Fox News debate in October. The Biden campaign made clear that the president would participate in only two.
During the first presidential debate in 2020, an aggressive Mr. Trump constantly interrupted Mr. Biden, and his poll numbers fell afterward.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair. “No more games. No more chaos. No more debate about debates.”
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The startling speed of the agreement was possible, in part, because senior officials in the two campaigns had been engaged in back-channel talks about debates in advance of the Biden campaign letter, according to four people familiar with the discussions. The two campaigns had a mutual interest in circumventing the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has overseen the events since 1988.
They also both wanted Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to face off directly, without Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other independent or third-party candidates. Mr. Kennedy wrote on social media on Wednesday that his dominant competitors were “colluding,” adding, “They are afraid I would win.”
In a sign of the preparation before Wednesday’s announcements, the Biden campaign had in recent days moved to reschedule a major New York fund-raising event planned for the evening of June 27.
Our politics reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
Learn more about our process.
If the June and September events go ahead and no additional debates are scheduled, Americans will be given their side-by-side looks at the two major-party presidential candidates before a vast majority of voters have access to their ballots. It will also give Mr. Biden a freer hand to script the final weeks of his last political campaign, focusing on turning out early voters without having to prepare for a high-stakes event on live television.
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For both candidates, the earlier dates allow for time to recover from a potentially uneven performance.
Presidential debates remain singular events in American politics. More than 73 million people tuned into the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020, and 84 million watched Mr. Trump’s first debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
One unusual aspect of this year’s general-election debates is that both candidates will be relatively rusty at sparring onstage.
Typically, the challenger has honed his skills in a series of primary debates. But Mr. Trump chose not to join those this year. The last debate either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden attended was their final 2020 one.
Both men are unpopular entering the general election. The latest polls of battleground states by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer showed that 40 percent of registered voters viewed Mr. Biden favorably, compared with 45 percent for Mr. Trump. But while a majority of voters have consistently seen Mr. Trump unfavorably for years, Mr. Biden was better liked four years ago.
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Mr. Biden has in recent months adopted a more pugnacious approach to Mr. Trump, delivering a major speech about democracy the day before the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, as well as a Trump-focused State of the Union address. Both sought to elevate the contrast between the two candidates and the stakes of this year’s election.
And while Mr. Biden trails in public and private polling, his campaign team still believes that he will improve his standing once voters accept the two men as their only realistic presidential options and are reminded of Mr. Trump’s record in office — particularly on issues like democracy and abortion rights.
In one reflection of why the Biden campaign thinks Americans need their memories jogged, The Times/Siena/Inquirer poll found that 17 percent of voters in the top six battleground states believed, incorrectly, that Mr. Biden, not Mr. Trump, was responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion.
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Mr. Trump and his campaign have often tried to needle Mr. Biden into committing to debates. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Trump, for his part, has spent months mocking Mr. Biden’s mental acuity and questioning his stamina to be onstage for 90 minutes.
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Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have come to regret setting the bar so low for Mr. Biden in the past, especially before his State of the Union address. The president delivered that speech with more verve than usual only hours after a Trump super PAC suggested in a television ad that Mr. Biden was so old, he might not live to survive another term.
Still, prominent supporters of Mr. Trump hardly downplayed his chances in the debates. Sean Hannity of Fox News predicted that Mr. Trump would “wipe the floor” with Mr. Biden. The Trump campaign reposted the clip on social media.
Mr. Biden presented his debate challenge on Wednesday with the kind of machismo that voters are more accustomed to hearing from Mr. Trump. “Well, make my day, pal,” Mr. Biden said in a video posted online. He went on to needle Mr. Trump for being confined to a courtroom four days a week: “I hear you’re free on Wednesday.”
Mr. Biden’s campaign also began selling T-shirts that read: “Free on Wednesdays.” It was a departure from the typical Biden posture of not commenting on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles.
Later, when Mr. Biden agreed to the Sept. 10 debate, he wrote on social media: “I’ll bring my plane, too. I plan on keeping it for another four years.”
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The decision to abandon the debate commission was not a big surprise. Mr. Trump has signaled his willingness to meet with or without the commission. And Mr. Biden’s team was frustrated, if not furious, that Mr. Trump debated Mr. Biden in 2020 despite appearing ill, soon thereafter testing positive for the coronavirus, and that Mr. Trump’s family had removed their masks while in the audience.
Some Biden advisers have been targeting the commission for the dustbin for even longer. A bipartisan report in 2015 from the Annenberg Public Policy Center — which counted among its authors Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser, and Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former White House chief of staff — recommended a thorough overhaul.
Yommie
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What young voters actually care about
It’s not what you think.By Christian Paz@realcpaz May 16, 2024, 7:15am EDT
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73350923/1244204365.0.jpg "A sign reading “Vote!” is stuck into a grassy patch surrounded by cement sidewalks, where people walk in both directions past it, carrying backpacks and books.")
Christian Paz is a senior politics reporter at Vox, where he covers the Democratic Party. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic’s politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election.
Long before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, young Americans were already souring on President Joe Biden. That discontent has only picked up in the last few months — registering in polls as increased support for Donald Trump and third-party candidates, and defections from the president, but not necessarily from his party.
The reasons for why this is happening have become one of the defining questions of the 2024 election so far. But what if this horse race is missing the point?
A new poll of young voters shared exclusively with Vox provides an important corrective: Young voters aren’t all that mystical; they’re a lot like the average American, concerned first and foremost with the state of the economy.
“People tend to have a skewed perception of what young voters prioritize,” Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint, which conducted this polling, told me. “A large part of that is because there are ways politically that young voters are very different and very distinct in what they care about. But the places that they’re different shouldn’t be confused with the places that they care the most about.”
This tracks with what my election reporting has turned up this year: Economic and affordability issues are far and away the top concern for all young voters in Blueprint’s latest poll. Progressive priorities, like climate change, student loans, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict, rank far below kitchen table issues.
Notably, the poll does not ask about a match-up between Biden and Trump, or about 2024 vote preferences. Those horse-race topics are the primary way that public debates and the discourse around young voters have been conducted this year, leading to foundational and epistemic questions over how much we can trust polling and whether we’re reading too much into the crosstabs or methodology of polls.
So what does this poll tell us? A lot. Here are the top four takeaways.
It’s the economy — and health care
Blueprint surveyed 943 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 30, recruited from an online panel from April 27 to April 29. The margin of error is 5.8 percentage points. Those participants were asked how important a variety of issues were to them, and able to choose multiple priorities.Sign up for the newsletterToday, Explained
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Across every kind of young voter asked — Democratic, independent, or Republican; Black or Latino or white; college-educated or not — some variation of an economic concern was a top electoral issue. As a whole, inflation and the economy were the most frequently prioritized issues, chosen by 73 percent and 70 percent of young voters, respectively.
Health care was the only rival issue — cited frequently by Democrats, Black and white voters, women, and those making more than $75,000 a year — and chosen 71 percent of the time by all young voters as a top priority.
The top priority for young voters is also the one where they trust Biden least
When young people talk about the economy, they overwhelmingly mean lowering prices on food, gas, and services — not creating more jobs, lowering interest rates, or even earning higher wages (though that’s the second most important thing).:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25449877/rzqQu_young_voters_prioritize_lowering_prices.png "A chart showing the share of all young voters, young Democrats, young independents, and young Republicans who prioritize more jobs, higher wagers, lower interest rates, and lower prices.")
That dynamic is nearly the inverse of the way the president has been talking about his economic record and about his plans for a second term. For most of his presidency and the campaign so far, he’s primarily talked about wage growth, cutting junk fees, and the historically low unemployment rate. And young voters see this: there’s a 37-point gap between how much they want Biden to prioritize lowering prices, and how much they think he is.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25449882/kq3sn_young_voters_don_t_think_biden_is_prioritizing_what_they_want.png "A chart showing what young voters across the partisan spectrum think President Joe Biden is prioritizing when it comes to the economy.")
Trump, meanwhile, is seen as focusing on prices. And this is the crucial conclusion: Trump is trusted more than Biden on the single most important issue: 52 percent say they trust Trump over Biden to reduce prices.
“Young voters trust Joe Biden more than Donald Trump on just about everything — except lowering prices. That’s a real problem,” Roth Smith told me. “If your only bright spot is the one that matters, that’s something that worries me, as a Democrat.”
The issues we associate with young voters aren’t very salient
When talking about young voters today, it seems like most politicians and the journalists covering the nation seem to default to a handful of progressive priorities: climate change, student loan cancellation, identity politics, and the war in Gaza.But at least according to this poll, those don’t tend to be the issues that young voters are prioritizing the most. Among the lowest-priority issues in this survey are LGBTQ issues, student loans (both chosen 38 percent of the time), while climate change, Israel and Palestine, democracy, and race relations were chosen just about half the time. And they don’t necessarily want Biden to make a major change on some of these topics.
A good chunk of young voters actually say that Biden is closer to their views on student loans (43 percent say this), and about 42 percent of independent voters say Biden is close to their views on abortion, student loans, and immigration and the border. Which leads us to…
Young voters are idiosyncratic; they aren’t the progressive saviors some people want them to be
As I’ve written before, the youth aren’t necessarily going to save us. “At a moment when people are sitting at home, watching campus protests or climate protests, and go ‘Wow, this new generation has totally different priorities,’ really, when you start to survey everyone, you find out that the kids are just like us,” Roth Smith said.They are almost an even ideological mix of moderate, liberal, and conservative — something many other surveys have found — but many still think Trump is not moderate enough.
For example, while about half of young voters see Biden as liberal, 74 percent say that Trump is conservative. They are more divided over how much more liberal or more conservative Biden should become; 37 percent would prefer he move to the left, 31 percent would prefer he move to the right, and 32 percent prefer he stay where he is.
“The difference for Trump is just about everyone who wants him to move wants him to move left,” Roth Smith said. While 39 percent want him to stay where he is, 45 percent want him to be less conservative.
It’s possible to draw out one more conclusion from this state of play: though young voters are upset, these conditions and feelings about Trump don’t seem to point toward a massive shift of young Americans toward Trump. They do point to plenty of problems: the top concern for a second Biden term is that he would be too old to do the job, followed by continued price increases, and being too pro-Israel. The top Trump concerns are more personal: that he would cut funding for Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes for the rich but not the working and middle class.
All this suggests there are plenty of opportunities for Biden to shore up his support, for his campaign to improve its messaging and targeting of voters, and for direct attacks on Trump that go beyond “Dobbs and Democracy.”
But it would be a mistake to assume that young voters are drastically different creatures. We’re essentially normies. We’re just young.
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Updated 3 hours ago -Politics & Policy
Biden-Harris campaign accepts VP debate invite from CBS
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on May 1 in Jacksonville, Fla. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The Biden-Harris campaign said Thursday that it has accepted an invitation from CBS News to participate in a vice presidential debate in July or August.
The big picture: The VP debate invitation comes after both President Biden and former President Trump agreed to presidential debates on June 27 and Sept. 10, hosted by CNN and ABC News.
Driving the news: The campaign accepted the invitation to participate in an in-studio VP debate on either July 23 or Aug. 13.
- "We look forward to the Trump campaign accepting one of these dates so that the full debate calendar for this campaign can be set," the Biden campaign said.
- Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has signaled that he could announce his running mate shortly before the convention, per the Associated Press.
- Trump did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment about whether he will accept the VP debate invitation.
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