“No meaningful effect”
Immediately after the debate, I said that it would have no real impact on the election one way or the other. A physically ill Biden underperformed, while Trump suspiciously overperformed, but it turned out those two things looked pretty much the same. There was no way that either candidate was going to win or lose any support from it.
My analysis was based on intuition, and while I’ve learned to trust my intuition on such things, it’s always good to get confirmation from other methods of analysis. In that regard Seth Abramson has an exhaustive analysis of the post-debate data and concluded “that the debate had no meaningful effect” on the number of Americans who think Biden shouldn’t be in the race. In other words, no minds were changed.
Seth ended up coming to the same conclusion I did, which is that (in his words) it’s the “lobbyists, donors, politicos, journalists, and D.C. lawmakers—uniquely self-interested political operators—who want President Biden to end his political career, but not the voters who will actually decide this election.”
In other words, the hysterics you’re seeing from the media right now really are nothing more than scripted ratings-driven performance art, not based in any sort of reality, and having no correlation to what voters are actually thinking. But then we already knew that.
