Trump is scrambling for an opening

Falling further behind Joe Biden, the president is lashing out

Friends,

I will have more to say in a longer premium blog post later this week, but for now I just wanted to touch base on where we are—in election terms and as a country—after last night’s presidential debate.

And let me begin by saying… wow, what a crap fest. I think Jake Tapper did the night justice when he described it as a “hot mess inside of a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck.” I’m not sure anyone watching really learned… well, anything of substance at all.

Anything, that is, besides how incapable Donald Trump is of being “presidential.” All the major post-debate media polls suggested that voters agreed on the same fundamental takeaway: Donald Trump’s frequent interruptions of Joe Biden and pretty blatant disregard for the decorum of the debate left viewers feeling more negative about him than they did before the debate. The reverse was true for Biden, who left voters feeling better about his ability to communicate as the head of state. It is hard not to agree with them.

The implications from last night’s performance is that Trump will lose some ground in the polls. It was, after all, a pretty horrific hour and a half. But this suggestion is complicated by the fact that debates don’t tend to change voters’ minds As I wrote in a blog post on Sunday and in a recent piece for The Economist, the average signed change in the incumbent’s margin in the polls from before to after the debate season is precisely zero percentage points.

On the other hand, the absolute change in polls from two weeks before to two weeks after the debate is about 4 points on average (only slightly higher than the average timespan over the course of the campaign) and I estimate that swings could be as large as eight points in the 95th percentile of movement. A shift toward Biden of either magnitude would likely spell doom for the president. (Though a shift the other way would quickly make the election rather competitive.)

I have to wonder if the president knows how precarious a situation his re-election bid is in. That would certainly explain some of his more recent statements about not conceding the election if he loses, or the continued assault on postal voting. It doesn’t take much (or any?) imagination to reckon that Trump would try to tilt the playing field his way if he knows he is very unlikely to win the election legitimately.

We may have seen a bit of this hopelessness on the debate stage, too. If Trump realizes that he is losing on 90%+ of the major issues and policies of the election and unlikely to gain enough ground if the status quo persists, he is incentivized to embrace strong-man tactics of bullying his opponent into appearing weak and perhaps less able to lead the country. Yet the president faces an uphill battle on this tactic, too, as Americans largely give him poorer marks for his personal behavior than they do his policies.

And this all makes me a bit worried for what we’ll see over the next few months. While I am supposed to be empirically-driven and offer insight with data, I can only help thinking that the future of the country is very uncertain, and darker than it has been for some time. That’s not much to do with Trump but more to do with how we the people are relating to each other. If Tuesday’s debate illustrated anything, it’s how willing about 40-45% of Americans are to sacrifice moral and traditionally “presidential” leadership in exchange for power. In our two-party world of zero-sum politics, that can probably only get worse…

…

Still, I am hopeful for the next few months. The debate commission has announced new rules to rein in the president, and most of the major cable TV hosts reacted in the right way to the debacle. They have also been rather clear about the danger Trump poses to our democracy long-term, even if they haven’t been as emphatic as I would like. There are reasons to try to spot silver-linings in our cloudy future.