In five weeks, one of the presidential campaigns will be proven wrong.
That's because strategists for both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump believe the upcoming televised debates will favor their candidates.
The Biden campaign believes the June 27 and Sept. 10 showdowns will remind uncertain voters that the 2024 election is in fact a rematch of the 2020 showdown and will once again portray Trump as a destabilizing and disruptive figure during his first term.
The Trump campaign believes the debate showed Biden far past his prime and vindicated the former president's assessment that he was “the worst debater I've ever faced. He can't string two sentences together.”
The Biden campaign believes it has entrapped the former president into accepting the debate on terms Biden does not like, including no audience for the former reality TV star to perform in and mute buttons to stop the candidates from interrupting each other — a favorite tactic of Trump.
The Trump campaign believes former President Biden's repeated recent debate challenges have forced Biden to accept not one, but two debates, despite his desire to avoid them altogether.
But behind the rhetoric and claims, there have always been presidential debates — at least two in every election since 1976, when rivals Jimmy Carter and President Gerald Ford were hoping to end a 16-year hiatus in a closely contested election that they both believed would go to their advantage.
Sound familiar?
Recent polls have shown Biden has all but erased Trump's initial small national lead, but he still faces the challenge of securing enough battleground states to secure the 270 electoral votes he needs.
Meanwhile, the results of recent presidential primaries, in which Biden and Trump faced virtually no challengers for the nomination they had already secured, suggested neither had the base they needed to win.
Trump's most likely Republican challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has the approval rating of just one in five Republicans but is backing her party's potential nominee.
Biden continues to lose support from a small minority of younger, more progressive Democrats who cast undecided votes to signal their opposition to his Middle East policy.
As a result, despite spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising targeted at specific parts of the coalition that won him the 2020 presidential election, Trump is still falling short of his campaign goals among minorities and young people who he needs in large numbers to win. Indeed, some polls have shown Trump leading Biden among voters under 30.
Presidential strategists say polls showed that even after Trump won the Republican nomination in March, many voters did not expect the president to face off again against a rival he narrowly beat four years ago.
In that situation, they feel a debate between the two would help overcome those doubts – and it's a necessary gamble for the White House, which has sought to protect Biden from surprises as much as possible.
But they also feel that, as in 2020, Trump is underestimating Biden's experience in handling such encounters and will lower expectations for the president by repeatedly labelling him an incompetent debater and weak leader.
Indeed, at key moments over the past four years, Biden has tended to exceed expectations when the situation demands it: his acceptance speech at the 2020 convention, his performance in the 2020 general election debates, and his past two State of the Union addresses.
Perhaps both candidates are still new to the action. Neither has debated since the two in 2020, when both shunned their primary rivals. Trump prefers rallies where he can lash out at his favorite targets without being refuted, rather than rallies where he's guaranteed to be cheered by his fans. Biden prefers a canned speech that lets him define the terms of the debate.
But both men were comfortable with the likely exclusion of wild-card candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently enjoys about 10 percent support nationally. He probably wouldn't meet the poll numbers and state voting qualifications required by debate organizers, but that could ultimately be the deciding factor between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in the closest states.
Without Kennedy, the debate may well reflect the nature of this election: a choice between stability and chaos.
It's important to remember that initial signs of success after a debate, such as instant polls, are dubious indicators of who will win an election. John F. Kennedy's strong performance in the first debate in 1960 led to his narrow victory, but since then, candidates' gaffes have often had a much larger impact.
In 1976, President Ford's puzzling comment that Communist-ruled Poland was free clearly contributed to his defeat, as did Democrat Mike Dukakis' weak response to a question about the death penalty in 1988, former President George Bush being filmed looking at his watch during a town hall debate in 1992, and former Vice President Al Gore's exaggerated reaction when he first met former President George W. Bush in 2000.
Meanwhile, former President Ronald Reagan bounced back from a scattershot first debate closing in on his age in the second debate in 1984, and former President Barack Obama bounced back from a weak performance in the 2012 debate that reflected overconfidence.
The defining moments of the post-debate debate will have an impact on the days and weeks to come, but there are still four months until the election, including two party conferences and at least one more debate.
So what happens on June 27th may be the beginning of the end, but it's not the end.
