The second and final debate between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden was more civil and organized than the first, but not without personal attacks and interruptions.
Kristen Welker of NBC News received praise for her assertiveness in handling the debate. But Trump again talked over Biden and the moderator and he exceeded his allotted speaking time more often than the former vice president. Both candidates used many of the same arguments and attacks from the first debate.
Discussion focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, American families, national security, and race. Candidates spent less than 15 minutes on climate change and didn’t cover leadership, one of the announced topics.
Trump ramped up his attacks on Biden’s son Hunter during a national security segment dominated by talk about taxes and candidates’ business dealings abroad. Still, Trump sounded calmer and more measured than he did in the first debate. There were less insults and incivilities.
Trump’s supporters will hope by conquering his tendency to self-sabotage on stage on Thursday night, the President will behave with more discipline. He is still searching for the momentum needed to unleash his promised hidden hordes of new voters and confound dire polls with one of the great comebacks in presidential campaign history. Or at least that he can get close enough to make his warning of a contested election he has already falsely derided as “unfair” a feasible possibility.
But Biden is sitting on a massive cash advantage, leads a race that has defied sharp turns even amid extreme circumstances. For months, Biden has made a case to a large chunk of voters that Trump’s botched handling of the pandemic should disqualify him from a second term. Democrats with dark memories of 2016 may panic if there is a tightening of the polls in the coming days. But the former vice president has more paths to the White House than Trump — whose path must run through Pennsylvania and Florida while he plays defense in multiple states he won four years ago.
Debates often turn out to be less important in shaping the final days of a race than they appear in their immediate aftermath. That may be especially the case this time with 50 million early votes already cast — more than one-third of the total vote in 2016. And one tempered performance by the President can’t erase the memory of four years of chaos, rage and scandal
