Biden struggled, Trump repeatedly lied, and CNN's moderators didn't fact-check.
MADELEINE: This is Madeleine (ph), here with my dad...
JOHN: John (ph).
MADELEINE: And we're missing the presidential debate tonight to see The Rolling Stones in Chicago. This podcast was recorded at...
ASHLEY LOPEZ, HOST:
11:32 P.M. Eastern Time on Thursday, June 27, 2024.
MADELEINE: Things may have changed by the time you hear it.
JOHN: And here's the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIG TOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Ooh. Congratulations.
LOPEZ: That's much more fun. Good for them. Hey, there. It's the NPR politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: The CNN presidential debate has now concluded. You can hear Stephen in the spin room with his ambient noise back there. And I want to go ahead and talk about what stood out to both of you. Mara, let's start with you, though. What stood out to you from tonight?
LIASSON: What stood out for me was that Joe Biden didn't even surpass the low expectations that had been set for him.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
LIASSON: And I've never gotten such a stream of texts from heartbroken and panicked Democrats as I have tonight. The reason this race has been so close is not because Donald Trump has outperforming or overperforming his numbers from 2020. It's because Biden has been underperforming his numbers from 2020. And he called for this debate. He asked for it to shake up the race, and his performance in the debate failed to do that.
LOPEZ: From the start.
LIASSON: From the very start, the first 30 seconds because his bottom line, his No. 1 job tonight was to show people who were worried that he was too old, that he was up to the job, and he failed. Here's a pretty early on example of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF CNN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID - excuse me - with dealing with everything we have to do with - look - if we finally beat Medicare.
JAKE TAPPER: Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?
LOPEZ: Yeah, a combination of hard to hear and hard to follow is not good. Stephen, what stood out to you during tonight's debate?
FOWLER: Yeah. And so I'm sitting here in the spin room where right now the surrogates from both campaigns are being mobbed by cameras and reporters and questions about everything that just happened in the last 2 hours or so. The thing that stood out to me is something that I've seen time and time and time again on the campaign trail - is that Trump's vision for America, how he's attacking Joe Biden and how he's painting his presidential run this time is just this dire doom and gloom vision. I mean, to hear Trump tell, America is in shambles right now, and it will maybe cease to exist if he's not elected again.
And I think that's something that has resonated and really rooted itself in the psyche of the Republican Party right now. And it's something that is very motivating for a very, very devoted base of his, but it's also something that is offputting to more moderate voters, to people who don't necessarily feel like they can't walk outside of their door because everything is terrible under Joe Biden's economy.
And I think in a bit of a contrarian take from Mara, I think Biden's performance was not great at the beginning, overall still not that great, but I don't think in the long run, it is going to matter as much as what Trump is saying and doing is presenting himself, because, I mean, remember, part of the reason that Joe Biden won the first time was because he was not Donald Trump, and that's kind of what we're seeing in this rematch here in 2024.
LIASSON: Yeah. And look - if voters are trying to decide between the guy that they think is too old and the guy they think is too dangerous, I don't think that Trump necessarily quieted their concerns tonight. He certainly came off as more vigorous than Biden did, but he didn't pivot to offering a positive vision for the future. He still came off as angry. And even though the moderators didn't fact check at all during this debate, I would say the vast majority of claims he made were demonstrable lies.
FOWLER: And, Mara, I would also say that in this fog of war immediately after the debate, there's a lot of hot takes. There's a lot of thoughts. There's a lot of people texting and tweeting and everything-ing, saying, 25th Amendment now. Or we need a brokered convention, or, you know - but what is going to be important is what trickles down, not just to the pundits and the reporters and the people shaping the coverage of this campaign but to those people that are maybe on the fence about voting or the people that still could conceivably choose between the two candidates or a third-party candidate are not voting at all.
You know, if you look at things in isolation, for example, the comments at the end of the debate were very different than the beginning of the debate. And so I think it's still too early to say what effect this is going to have. I will say though, debates typically don't move the needle. This one in this election year with these two candidates could be different.
LIASSON: And, you know, when you talk about the things that trickle down to voters and really stick with them about debates, they're those moments that become viral. They're the memes. And there were just a lot of camera shots of Joe Biden with his mouth open. And when he talked, he sounded like a desiccated husk. Those are things that are going to be replayed ad nauseum on social media, and they might be the things that voters end up remembering because they're just going to hear about them so much.
LOPEZ: Yeah. You know, I tried to watch the debate at times through the lens of the kind of voter that Stephen just described, like someone who might be on the fence, maybe unsure of how to vote and hasn't really been paying that much attention to the election up until now, which I think is a lot of voters. This was an opportunity for both Trump and Biden to make a pitch to those voters, to provide maybe some clarity on big issues policy-wise that the country is facing. I got to say, I don't know how anyone walked away from this debate with, like, a better picture, specifically on policy. Some really important issues were brought up, like inflation and childcare costs. And I don't know. I didn't hear many lucid, clear policy proposals. And I mean, a lot of this got mired in, kind of tangential conversations. Like, I mean, what was that conversation about golf? I mean, I can't even. How is this, in the 90 minutes we have to debate the future of this country - how is this taking up this much time? It was really kind of striking to me.
FOWLER: There's the hypothetical meme about, oh, what does the average voter in a diner in the Midwest think about this? I mean, honestly, they might talk about the bickering back and forth over the golf scores and who's more physically fit, but honestly, not in a good way for the future of democracy, which also was a topic of discussion.
LOPEZ: And we're definitely going to talk more about that soon. For now, a quick break, more in a second.
And we're back. And I want to pivot to talking about the moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. There seems to have been a choice made by CNN to let the candidates speak and not interrupt them even to offer sort of basic fact-checking. Stephen, can you talk to me about the kind of position this put specifically Biden in but also how this kind of frame the debate?
FOWLER: Yeah, so it's never easy to wrangle a live debate. It was definitely a choice during this debate to just let the two candidates largely go and largely say things that weren't true and largely just let it happen and let it ride. What this does is it doesn't really give people a sense of what's actually true about these major topics like immigration, about the economy. I mean, both Biden and Trump said things that weren't true. But if you're listening to that in real time, which - let's be honest; most people aren't - it allows them to fudge the record a little bit and kind of create moments that aren't as grounded in truth and reality. And it's honestly another negative against the utility of debates because you don't get their stances. And as another point, along with the fact-checking element of this, there were plenty of times where Trump and Biden were asked questions and reasked questions that they just decided not to answer.
LIASSON: Right, and voters will have to decide how important those nonanswers are, such as the times that Trump was asked, would you accept the results of the election, even if you don't win? And he refused.
(SOUNDBITE OF CNN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
DANA BASH: Will you pledge tonight that once all legal challenges have been exhausted, that you will accept the results of this election regardless of who wins, and you will say right now that political violence in any form is unacceptable?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I shouldn't have to say that, but of course, I believe that. It's totally unacceptable. And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it's one of the strongest statements you've ever seen, in addition to the speech I made in front of, I believe, the largest crowd I've ever spoken to. And I will tell you nobody ever talks about that. They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol.
LIASSON: Donald Trump has never said, since 2015, that he would accept the results of an election that he lost. He said it all - it depends if it's fair, fair according to him. But I do think, Stephen, we have to be fair. They both said things that weren't true, but there's no comparison between the number of lies, flagrant lies, that Trump told compared to Biden. To say that he was responsible for insulin coming down to $35 is just false, and there were, like, dozens of other things. But I agree with you. The fact that the moderators decided not to fact check helped Donald Trump because he's the one for whom lying is a superpower. Unchallenged lies are even a bigger superpower.
And the other thing that helped Trump was the new rules of shutting off mics after your time is up. In 2020, Trump probably was perceived to have lost the debate where he continuously interrupted Biden. But this time, the microphones being shut off gave him a kind of discipline that he might not have brought on his own.
FOWLER: And, Mara, this is where I think I go back to my takeaway of the debate and why I think that it might be a little bit different than how it's playing out in the immediate aftermath because Trump's core identity of his 2024 campaign is this doom and gloom vision of America. But Biden and the Democrats are painting their campaign and his candidacy as this defense of democracy, as, look what Trump might do if he's elected again and, you know, Trump's response to 2020 and January 6. And the other things that we heard in the debate has been consistent, like you said. And I think that's what Biden is trying to hammer home - that Trump doesn't respect democracy. He's going to stomp all over the Constitution if he's elected. He's already done it once. He'll do it again. That, I think, might ultimately win out with the right voters.
LIASSON: With that tiny slice of persuadable voters. Now, you know, 70% of Republicans, of course, think Trump won in 2020, and they say that democracy is a very big concern for them, but they define it quite differently. But I think what's going to happen in the near term is there's going to be a tremendous amount of attention on Democrats.
LOPEZ: Which brings me to my next question, which is, like, also in the somewhat future, Mara, there's supposed to be another debate scheduled.
LIASSON: Well, that's a good question. Will there be one? Because Donald Trump certainly doesn't need one. Joe Biden needed this one, but he didn't get what he needed. And I don't know if there'll be another one.
LOPEZ: Yeah, definitely something to watch. All right. Let's leave it there for today. We'll be back in your feeds Friday afternoon with our usual roundup and, of course, Can't Let it Go. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
FOWLER: I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: And thank you, as always, for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIG TOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.