Americans
Saw Trump Unfiltered and Recoiled in Horror
Polling
suggests that the president dealt a severe blow to his reelection chances with
his performance in the first debate.
OCTOBER 15, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
Here’s a
paradox of the Trump era: The president is the most overexposed figure in
American political history. You can turn on your television, open any newspaper
or magazine, or log on to practically any social-media site at any time and get
a strong dose of Donald Trump. The man is everywhere.
Yet
unless you’re a political junkie, you can easily get by without watching Trump
at length or really paying deep attention. He may seem inescapable, but he’s
just part of the atmosphere—an acrid presence you eventually get used to, like
the industrial stench in a factory town. Some people are constantly focused on
him: the Trump superfans who feast on his every word; the “resistance”
super-sharers who howl at and mock it all; and, most pathetic, political
reporters. All three groups are loud, but they are not the majority of
Americans.
That
brings us to the first presidential debate, last month. A debate is a chance to
see both candidates relatively unfiltered. And given a rare chance to see the
president at length, without filters or interruptions (except many of his own),
many Americans looked at Trump and recoiled in horror.
The
debate was the start of a bad week for the president. First, viewers panned his
performance; then he fell ill with COVID-19. The president’s polling fell and
it can’t get up, and the debate seems to be the major culprit. Consider the
latest USC Dornsife poll. Any individual poll can offer only so much
information about the race, which is why polling averages are so helpful. But the
Dornsife poll is a tracking poll, which repeatedly surveys the same group of
voters. That makes the up-and-down direction of the poll useful for spotting
changing dynamics in the race.
Before
the debate, the pollsters asked panelists to rate their expectations of the
candidates on a zero-to-100 scale. The guesses came in the middle of the
pack—51 for Trump and 50 for Joe Biden. The pollsters resurveyed after the
summit. The former vice president didn’t have a great night, and his average
rating was 46, a slight underperformance.
But Trump
nosedived. His postdebate rating was a putrid 33, 18 points below expectations.
While every ideological group rated him poorly, his worst showing came among
Republican-leaning independents, with whom his rating dropped 24 points. That’s
a group that is especially important to the president’s reelection chances.
Although his base remains solid, he needs to get GOP leaners to vote for him,
rather than going for Biden or simply sitting out the election.
The
debate hurt Trump’s standing versus Biden in other categories as well. The
Democrat’s edge on mental fitness for the presidency increased seven points, to
19, after the debate, with half of voters saying they don’t believe Trump is
mentally fit. On a basic presidential-preference question, Biden extended his
lead over Trump from nine to 13 points.
For
regular Trump watchers, his performance wasn’t all that surprising. The
president was rude, shouty, and racist. He spoke in fluent conspiracy theory,
unintelligible to most members of the public, and was generally unpresidential.
In other words, it was maybe on the worse end of his normal range. But most
people aren’t watching Trump at length—they’re consuming him in small bites,
whether that’s sound bites on the news or decontextualized tweets.
It’s true
that Fox News gives Trump a great deal of attention, but Fox’s average
prime-time viewership in the third quarter was a record 3.5 million people. By
contrast, 73 million Americans watched the first
debate on TV alone, leaving out those who streamed it on a device or listened
to it on the radio. Meanwhile, interest in Trump’s rallies—once spectacles that
would lead TV networks to preempt regular programming—has subsided.
When you
get Trump only in small doses, it’s possible to overlook his incoherence, to dismiss his espousal of
conspiracy theories as simple trolling, or to claim that the media are
misrepresenting him. But over the course of 90 minutes, with no commercial
breaks, those excuses start to dissolve.
“It’s not
clear that seeing more of the president is necessarily a help to his campaign,”
the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told The New York Times.
Coming
into the debates, the conventional pundit wisdom was that Trump needed the
debates more than Biden did, because the candidate who trails needs to change
the race. Even after the poor reviews of the first debate, this logic still
held. But after Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, the Commission on Presidential
Debates announced that the debate would go virtual. Trump angrily pulled out. If
it were true that Trump couldn’t afford to miss a debate, this would be weirdly
self-defeating. But the Dornsife poll suggests something different: Maybe he
couldn’t afford the exposure.
With the
debate canceled, Trump and Biden are both participating in individual town
halls tonight, on NBC and ABC, respectively. According to the Daily Beast, “Trump has told
close associates that he wishes to counter-program the Biden town hall and
score higher TV viewership numbers, and then use such a contrast in ratings to
humiliate his Democratic opponent.” Perhaps he would be wiser hoping that his
ratings tank.