Six things to watch as Biden and Trump face off in presidential debate

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For the past week, Joe Biden has been hunkered down at Camp David, intensively rehearsing for Thursday’s debate with Donald Trump. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has eschewed formal preparation and baselessly accused Mr. Biden of using cocaine to enhance his performance.

This contrast – studied Mr. Biden and bombastic Mr. Trump – is a possible preview of what viewers will see in the head-to-head matchup at CNN studios in Atlanta at 9 p.m. ET. Canadians will be able to watch the debate live on CNN, via cable or their YouTube channel, as well as CBC and CTV, which will both be broadcasting the debate.

At Mr. Biden’s insistence, the pair are eschewing the Commission on Presidential Debates, which usually organizes these bouts. Instead, he dictated his own ground rules to avoid a repeat of a chaotic debate between the two men in 2020: There will be no live studio audience, each candidate will speak in 90-second increments and their microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to talk.

As much as the hot-button issues dividing the country, the attention will be on the candidates’ personalities and performances. Will the tighter format help Mr. Biden avoid the public-speaking stumbles that have stoked questions over his age? And will it, or moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, rein in Mr. Trump’s penchant for pugilism and falsehoods?

“I don’t think this is a debate where either side is coming in saying ‘I hope our guy hits a home run,’ ” said Grant Reeher, a political scientist at Syracuse University. “They’re coming in saying ‘I hope our guy doesn’t strike out.’ ”

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The economy

As President, Mr. Biden has passed a string of popular economic policies: an infrastructure package, a plan for boosting semiconductor production in the U.S. and the climate change-fighting Inflation Reduction Act, which also shores up automaking jobs.

Unfortunately for the Democratic incumbent, voters appear to be far more focused on the 20-per-cent inflation of prices over the past four years.

Look for this to be one of Mr. Trump’s most potent areas of attack. It is relatively unfreighted with the culture-war baggage of other major issues, offering the Republican former president some opportunity to peel off what few undecided voters might remain.

“Both candidates have issues they should emphasize and put the other person in a corner on,” said Sandy Maisel, an expert in U.S. elections at Colby College in Maine. “Trump has a massive advantage in the polls on how the country views the economy. Biden’s task is to talk about how inflation is an issue he inherited and he’s worked to bring it down. But he so far hasn’t been able to communicate that effectively.”

Mr. Biden may also try to counterpunch by portraying Mr. Trump’s policies as far more inflationary: his promise to impose 10-per-cent tariffs on all imports, for instance.

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The border

Nearly a decade after he first promised the wall, immigration remains Mr. Trump’s signature issue. A surge of migration over the past two years has left cash-strapped cities, particularly New York, struggling to house newcomers. Mr. Trump is guaranteed to fire broadsides at Mr. Biden over this.

The question for the Republican is how far he chooses to go. Pointing to the logistical crises of migration is one thing. His standard rally speech, in which he claims without evidence that other countries are deliberately sending prison inmates on an “invasion” of the U.S., is another.

Mr. Biden will certainly tout his executive order this month allowing border officers to turn back migrants without giving them an opportunity to make an asylum claim. He will also hammer Mr. Trump for having congressional Republicans torpedo a border-security bill earlier this year.

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Democracy and rule of law

The first-ever former president brought up on criminal charges, Mr. Trump has been convicted in relation to a hush-money scheme and faces further prosecutions for trying to overturn the 2020 election and absconding with classified documents after leaving office.

Mr. Trump’s standard defences on all of this rely heavily on conspiracy theories. He continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged and that the White House controls the court cases against him.

How the moderators, Mr. Tapper and Ms. Bash, handle this will be a key test. Mr. Tapper has in the past ordered CNN to cut away from Mr. Trump’s speeches when his litany of lies start. But the cable network has said the debate moderators will not be expected to engage in extensive fact-checking.

Mr. Biden will likely seek to tie all of this in with the authoritarian aspects of his rival’s agenda and rhetoric. Mr. Trump is promising to fire swaths of civil servants and replace them with political loyalists, has mused about using the Justice Department to take revenge on his opponents and once said he will be a dictator for his first day back in office.

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Abortion

When the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, they gave the Democrats a potent election issue.

Polling has shown a consistent majority of Americans are effectively pro-choice. They have repeatedly voted in favour of state-level measures to protect abortion access.

Mr. Biden is campaigning to enshrine abortion in federal law and has taken interim steps to make abortion drugs more easily available. He will hammer Mr. Trump for ending Roe by appointing three anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court and seek to link him to further efforts to ban contraception and in-vitro fertilization.

Mr. Trump has struggled with the issue. At times, he claims credit for ending abortion rights. At others, he passes the buck to state governments.

“This is an issue that can play very well for Biden with particular audiences, such as suburban women in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in activating Democratic voters and reaching independent and Republican women,” Prof. Maisel said.

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Foreign policy: Gaza, Ukraine, climate

Americans may not vote much on foreign policy, but it is a stark dividing line between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, as well as between factions in the candidates’ parties.

Mr. Biden is under siege on one side for supporting Israel’s invasion of Gaza after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks and on the other for not doing enough to back the Jewish state. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is caught on Ukraine between traditional Republicans who favour helping Kyiv fight Russia’s invasion and nationalists who would prefer Washington drop its support.

Mr. Biden will tout his backing of Ukraine while portraying Mr. Trump as a toady of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Trump will play up his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accuse Mr. Biden of being insufficiently tough on Hamas.

More importantly, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert in presidential debates at the University of Pennsylvania, this subject could be one where the debate clarifies some of the candidates’ murkier positions. Mr. Trump, for instance, has never said definitively if he would continue U.S. support to Ukraine.

“The major thing a debate can do is make sure that the public understands what Trump and Biden would do about a particular issue,” she said. “Even a candidate ducking a question is giving you useful information.”

The same goes for climate change. While Mr. Biden has made it central to his agenda, it has received little discussion on the campaign trail, with most Republicans either denying its science or ignoring it.

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The old men and the C(NN)

Mr. Biden’s campaign blamed the Commission on Presidential Debates for the tumultuous tilt in September, 2020, which Mr. Trump repeatedly interrupted. So he instead brokered deals for Thursday’s debate with CNN and a September rematch on ABC. Both will be earlier in the cycle than the traditional three-debate round in the fall, minimizing the potential effect on the election.

For Mr. Trump, the questions now are whether the format will constrain him and whether he will be able to restrain himself. For Mr. Biden, it will be whether he can avoid his tendency for verbal gaffes and deliver the sort of energetic performance he gave in his State of the Union address.

For both of them, it will be whether their status as the oldest people to ever seek the presidency – Mr. Biden is 81 and Mr. Trump is 78 – will hinder their governance.

Either way, Prof. Jamieson contends the new debate rules are an improvement over years past. Both live audiences and open microphones, she says, were detriments.

“Audiences were choreographed by the campaigns to give certain impressions to people back home,” she said. “And when candidates talk over each other, the public can’t learn what they are trying to say.”