June 23, 2024, 2:06 p.m.
When President Biden and Donald Trump face off against each other in the CNN studios in Atlanta on Thursday, they will be both the most experienced debaters ever and the rustiest ever to tangle on the presidential debate stage. Between them, they have debated 47 times—31 for Biden, starting in 1988, and 16 for Trump, mostly in 2016.
But neither has taken to a debate stage since Oct. 22, 2020, at Belmont University in Nashville, marking three years and 249 days between debates. In the 64 years since Democrat John F. Kennedy debated Republican Richard Nixon, that is an unprecedented gap between debates for the two parties' nominees.
That introduces a big note of uncertainty into this week’s Biden-Trump showdown. The history of presidential debates is clear—the incumbent president, who is usually the only candidate whose path to the nomination does not include any primary debates, almost always loses the first debate because of rustiness. The candidates who did not debate in the primaries—Nixon in 1960, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush in 2004, Barack Obama in 2012, and Trump in 2020—were seen as the consensus losers of the first debate. All of their opponents had debated in the primaries—Kennedy only once in West Virginia and the others multiple times.
The only exception was Bill Clinton in 1996. He prevailed in his first debate over challenger Bob Dole, who was not a natural debater despite his years in the Senate.
“They’re not rusty at speaking. They’re rusty at being taken on and having it stuck to them,” said Samuel Popkin, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California at San Diego. “Nobody in the White House says, ‘You suck.’ Nobody in the White House says, 'You failed America and destroyed the economy.' Nobody—nobody—really insults you. Instead, they tend to tell you that people don’t understand your genius.”
Popkin encountered that first-hand when he played the role of Reagan in debate prep for President Carter in 1980. “He was definitely not happy,” said Popkin, remembering that Carter angrily tried to end the session.
In his 2012 book The Candidate. What it Takes to Win—and Hold—The White House, Popkin sketched the scene at Camp David. “When I spoke he would alternately feign a smile or wrinkle his nose in disgust; look away from me in embarrassment or glare at me in anger. Then I noticed red spots on his cheeks and hostile looks … around the room.” He added, “The president looked lonely and vulnerable when he heard Reagan’s critique in front of his wife, his closest friends, and his inner circle. He had lost his presidential aura.”
Carter was not unique in his distaste for debate prep. Chris Christie, in his 2019 book Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, called Trump’s 2016 debate prep “a total shit show.” He recalled that when aides brought to Trump Tower a debate-style podium and a camera to videotape the prep, Trump raged, “Get out. Get out. Take your equipment and get out. I’m not doing this. And get this podium out of here."
Christie wrote that Trump “was not a mock-debate guy.” That was true in 2016, even truer in 2020, and remains true in the lead-up to Thursday's debate. Again, he has refused to do mock debates. Instead, he is continuing to do campaign rallies while Biden is sequestered at Camp David doing his prep. Trump is also holding policy discussions with various officeholders, including some of the finalists for his VP choice.
Then-President Trump debating Joe Biden during the second and final presidential debate of 2020, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, Pool)
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“Whether he needs to do traditional debate prep is an interesting question,” said William Galston, who was President Clinton’s domestic policy adviser. “He never has and never will. He relies on his instincts, which often serve him very well. But if he allows his passions to overwhelm his instincts, that is where he gets into trouble.”
Galston added one other factor that contributes to the rustiness of both candidates. Both prefer to limit their exchanges with reporters to friendly outlets unlikely to ask tough questions. “They’re not typically surrounded by people pushing back at them. So they find it very easy to believe their own talking points.” He added, “In Biden’s case, there’s an additional difficulty in that he’s taken on pretty close to a record low of press conferences, which provide an alternate means of staying sharp.”
Before his first debate in the Republican primaries in 2016, Trump told ABC’s This Week that “I’m not a debater and they are.” He dismissed the other candidates as “all talk, no action," saying, "They debate all the time.” He also insisted that he did not plan to attack the other candidates, a promise he quickly dropped.
Biden is following the more traditional prep route. His aides also are buoyed by the fact that the president has debated more than Trump has and has enjoyed some memorable moments. In a Democratic debate in Philadelphia on Oct. 30, 2007, Biden aimed a zinger at Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani, quipping, “There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” That hurt Giuliani’s already struggling campaign and provoked lasting enmity by the former New York mayor toward the president.
In a race that has been stubbornly unmoved for months, both candidates understand how high the stakes are on Thursday. “If Biden sounds good, he’s killed a lot of the narrative,” Popkin said. “If Trump is coherent, he’s killed the other narrative.” He added, “There are openings for Biden if he has the energy. And there are openings for Trump if Biden isn’t nimble on his feet.”
No one, though, expects one 90-minute debate to erase voter doubts about Biden’s age and stamina. “There’s no way Joe Biden can convince people he has more energy than Donald Trump," Popkin said. "Trump has spent his life learning how to project activity and strength.”
Galston said the stakes are heightened by the static nature of the race. “I’ve taken a look at the polls over the past 10 months. This is the closest thing to a frozen election that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Not only are the national polls where they were 10 months ago, but the variation in support for the two candidates during that 10-month period has been amazingly small.” No event, he said, has a greater potential to move that stuck needle than this debate.
