Will this be the last debate?

A weird decision by Biden could reduce Harris’s options.

June ought to be for baseball and barbecues. Our friends in the United Kingdom can conduct entire election campaigns in a few weeks. No one other than people who write Substack newsletters benefits from general election campaigns that persist for six months or more. So June 27 was ridiculously early for a presidential debate.

However, the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump turned out to be the most consequential debate in American election history, setting off a series of events that knocked Biden out of the race.

But the thing is that September 10 — tomorrow night, when a debate will take place in Philadelphia — is pretty damned early, too. And whoever loses and needs to throw a Hail Mary may not have much leverage to push for another debate later.

Prior to this year, the earliest presidential debate in general election history had been on September 21, 1980. That was a weird one: the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, refused to participate because of the presence of the independent John B. Anderson, a wonky candidate (vague whiff of Pete Buttigieg) who drew slightly more votes from Democrats than Republicans. Carter did eventually debate Reagan (sans Anderson) on Oct. 28 — the latest debate in history — and got his clock cleaned, turning what had been a fairly close race in the polls into a Reagan landslide.

The early calendar is the result of a decision by Joe Biden to blow up the schedule: the Commission on Presidential Debates had originally planned events on Sept. 16, Oct. 1, and Oct. 9. To be clear, Donald Trump — who refused to participate in any of the GOP primary debates this year and who has repeatedly feuded with the CPD — might have backed out of the debates if Biden hadn’t. He’s not exactly a great respecter of political norms, that Trump guy.

My take at the time was that this was a defensive move by Biden, reducing both the number of debates and their impact by moving their timing forward — perhaps because the White House thought their guy had lost his fastball. That take … didn’t age very well. Or did it? The debate was nothing if not impactful. But I will give myself credit for this: envisioning the possibility that Biden’s performance might be so bad that he’d have to drop out:

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.

So this was either the dumbest or the smartest decision in campaign history, depending on whether you’re looking at it from Biden’s perspective or the perspective of the Democratic Party — and whether you want to give the White House any credit for considering this possibility. So far, I’ve seen no reporting to suggest that the White House knew what it was doing — instead, ex-Biden staffers have been incredibly whiny and petulant — although if the Maggie Haberman book¹ on the 2024 campaign reveals there was a mole in the White House who had been thinking about this scenario, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked.

Traders at Polymarket estimate there’s a 50 percent chance of another debate this year. (They’re not counting the VP debate, scheduled for Oct. 1.) But after thinking through the mechanics of the situation, I’d probably take the under.