Given that nowadays campaigns can put vast amounts of policy proposals and details on the internet, debates are not the place to unveil new ones or discuss them in depth. At this stage of the election season, debates are unlikely to cause voters to switch allegiances. There is the persistent belief in the media that there are these genuinely undecided voters who look to the debates to help them make a choice. But such people are probably very few. Most ‘undecided’ voters are already leaning towards one candidate or another and the best one can do is to retain them.
The main goal of these debates is to energize supporters of your candidate and depress the emotions of those of your rival. The June 27th debate caused many Democrats to feel that they were going to lose with Joe Biden as their candidate, so in that sense creepy Donald Trump achieved that goal. The problem was that he was too successful in that Biden dropped out and was replaced by Kamala Harris who has completely turned that enthusiasm gap around. Creepy Trump cannot be blamed for not anticipating this possibility, given that it was unprecedented. I had long ago given up the idea that the Democratic nominee could be anyone other than Biden and had resigned myself to the possibility that, bar some kind of miracle, he would slowly drift into defeat in November. But such a miracle did occur.
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