What Biden's debate gambit reveals

The White House gets an A+ on tactics — but they're playing a mediocre hand.

Here’s something I would have given approximately a 0.001 percent chance of happening when I woke up this morning: there will be a presidential debate in June. President Biden and former President Trump agreed today to debate on June 27 on CNN, and then again on September 10 on ABC News.

And here’s something else I wouldn’t have had on my bingo card: Biden’s campaign pulled out of the three presidential debates scheduled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which were originally scheduled for September 17, October 1 and October 9. The CPD has run the debates since 1988, planning two presidential debates that year and in 1996, and three in every other cycle. (In 2020, three debates were originally scheduled but one was cancelled after Trump contracted COVID.)

Still, the episode reveals something about the White House: it thinks it has more to lose than to gain from the debates. And that’s a bad sign for Biden and his campaign.

It’s time for some game theory

I’m not someone who particularly cares about tradition for tradition’s sake, and the debates are in some ways incredibly strange spectacles. I was invited to a couple of presidential primary debates in my days with the New York Times and ABC News, which I assumed meant getting an up-close-and-personal look in the debate hall. Instead, the audience is filled by VIPs, while every campaign journalist in America sits in a nearby gymnasium, munching on cheap pizza and side-eyeing one another’s Twitter feeds as they watch the proceedings on TV. You can literally see the groupthink being manufactured in real time.

But even when traditions — like those established by the Commission on Presidential Debates — are arbitrary or downright stupid, norms play an important role from a game theory standpoint as coordinating mechanisms. More well-established traditions are costlier to break — there’s typically more social approbation for breaking the rules when everyone knows what the rules are.

We as the public have a collective interest in debate traditions being costly to break, because debates lead to a more well-informed electorate — in principle, anyway. Whereas from the standpoint of the campaigns, the debates are zero-sum. In any given election, in other words, one candidate stands more to gain from the debates, either because she’s the more skilled debater or because she’s trailing in the race and has more incentive to take risk. Nevertheless, the debates have taken place each cycle because candidates assume they’d pay a price for ducking them. If the expected value of debating is −2 but the public relations cost of not debating is −5 because of increased skepticism from voters and the media, you should take the least-worst option by debating. (Friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman — a fellow poker player — made a similar point on Twitter today.)

Of course, the norms around the debates — like many other American political norms — had already massively eroded in recent years. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that I have no problem criticizing Democrats — but here, I don’t want to be too both-sides-y. I think it’s correct to attribute most of the blame for norm-erosion to Republicans, and in particular to Trump.

Especially when it comes to debates. Trump, after all, refused to participate in any GOP primary debates this year. And in the 2020 general election, the roles were reversed, with the Biden campaign arguing to adhere to the traditional CPD schedule while the Trump campaign threatened to break the rules, claiming to want more and earlier debates:

In 2019, Trump claimed that the 2016 debates were "biased", and suggested that he may not participate in further CPD-hosted debates. In December 2019, Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., the co-chairman of the CPD, met with Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign chairman, to discuss Trump's comments. Fahrenkopf said "the president wanted to debate, but they had concerns about whether or not to do it with the commission."^[9] While Trump did not press the issue further publicly, in June 2020, he requested additional debates to the traditional three, which Biden's campaign declined.^[10] At the end of June, representatives of the Biden campaign confirmed that they had agreed to the original schedule.^[11]

The Trump campaign submitted a request to the CPD to move the scheduled debates up in the calendar, or to add a fourth debate in relation to mail-in voting; the request was declined in August 2020.^[12] Later that month, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi suggested that Biden should skip the debates, claiming that Trump will "probably act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency". Biden responded by stating that he would go ahead and participate to "be a fact-checker on the floor while [...] debating [Trump]".^[13]

So “Trump started it” is a fair retort for Biden — but at this point, everybody is being a full-on hypocrite. What’s consistent, though, is that in both 2020 and 2024, Biden wanted fewer debates and Trump wanted more.

In fact, the Trump campaign, after agreeing today to the two debates proposed by Biden, asked for two additional debates in July and August for a total of four. The White House refused, rather ridiculously citing the potential for “chaos” after they created chaos by blowing up original schedule just this morning:

The Biden campaign slammed the door on Donald Trump’s attempt to have more than two debates. “President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair. “No more games. No more chaos. No more debate about debates.”

So the White House unambiguously wants fewer debates rather than more. And that’s a bad sign for Biden — part of a pattern where the White House has continually tried to minimize his exposure to unscripted moments. I wouldn’t quite say they’ve done the bare minimum when it comes to media appearances. But they’ve done the bare minimum more than the bare minimum, trying to optimize some function of minimizing both their 81-year-old candidate’s exposure and media criticism about the lack of said exposure. And when they have done media appearances, it’s mostly been with friendly sources like Howard Stern and pointedly not with more adversarial ones like the New York Times or Washington Post.

Preferring fewer debates is particularly bad sign given that 1) Biden is trailing in the race and therefore should want more chaos and variance and 2) that the debates went well enough for him last time. In fact, Biden was judged the winner of both debates against Trump in post-debate polls in 2020 — something that’s been a consistent pattern for Democrats in recent years; Hillary Clinton also won all three debates against Trump in overnight polls, for instance. (Although given that Clinton lost outright and Biden badly underperformed his polls in November 2020, perhaps we should treat those overnight polls with more skepticism.)

It may be — as Axios reported this week — that the White House is in denial about its position in the polls and therefore is incorrectly being too risk-averse. That would be bad enough. But it’s an even worse sign if the White House thinks its candidate has lost his fastball and has deteriorated as a debater versus four years ago.

And the other excuses the White House has given aren’t convincing. In its letter announcing its pullout from the CPD debates, the Biden-Harris campaign cited early voting as a factor, but this is a bullshit excuse. The final CPD debate had been scheduled for October 9. On the equivalent date in 2020¹, only 5.6 million votes had been cast by mail or early in person out of the 158 million that were eventually tallied — and that was in the middle of a pandemic when early and remote voting were more common. Furthermore, people who vote early tend to be highly motivated partisans and not the swing voters who could plausibly change their minds on the basis of the debates. (The failure to recognize this has led to a quadrennial tradition of bad predictions from extrapolating the early vote.)

As someone who’s studied these dynamics extensively and even tried to model them out, I can tell you with confidence that polling bounces created by things like debates, conventions and primary wins have a shelf-life. See for instance, Mitt Romney and the first presidential debate in 2012. He was widely regarded as the winner of the debate and then pulled into a near Electoral College tie with Barack Obama. But within a few weeks, the polls reverted back to where they had been before.

By pushing one debate into June, therefore, Biden has made it much less impactful. Whatever effects it has will probably be drowned out by the conventions and then the stretch run of the campaign and umpteen other shifts in the narrative. And the September 10 debate is also relatively early, a week sooner than when the CPD had wanted the first debate.

So basically, Biden traded three debates after Labor Day for one debate after Labor Day. If the White House thinks the debates are a liability for Biden, this is a brilliant tactical move — and I mean that sincerely. By throwing this curveball, Biden made it appear as though he proactively wanted more debates when he actually wanted fewer. And he doesn’t seem to be paying too much of a PR price for it. The media has mostly gone along with the White House narrative — not to mention Democratic partisans yelling at me on Twitter — fooled by his sleight-of-hand into not recognizing that 2 < 3.

There’s one other tactical wrinkle — I suppose I’m skeptical that the White House was thinking about it, but if so, I’ll up their grade from A+ to A+++. By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value. Here’s what I mean by that. If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.

After all, if Democrats really think that Trump is an existential threat to democracy or whatever else, that means making the most of their position, however poor it might be. Biden is trailing in the swing states, faces a number of other headwinds, and otherwise holds a fairly bad hand. Today the White House pulled off a great bluff — but if that June debate goes really badly, the only remaining move will be to fold.

1. October 7, since the 2020 election was held on November 3 whereas this year is November 5.