ATLANTA — The stage is set, literally, for the biggest moment in the presidential campaign to date.
President Biden and former President Trump will meet here Thursday evening for a debate that could reshape a race in which the former president holds a small lead over the incumbent.
Biden and Trump, standing at lecterns just 8 feet apart, will debate without an audience, faced only by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The rules of the debate call for the muting of each candidate’s microphone while the other is speaking.
The impulse on CNN’s part is plainly to avoid a repetition of the chaotic first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020, which cast plenty of heat but little light. It remains to be seen whether the effort to assert order will be successful.
Trump limbered up for the debate Wednesday with a social media post alleging that Biden is “a walking LYING MACHINE.” The Biden campaign released a new TV ad the previous day claiming Trump is “focused on revenge” and “only out for himself” while Biden “is fighting for your family.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the debate site’s cavernous spin room — housed in an arena that usually plays host to Georgia Tech basketball games — was empty except for a scattering of television production staff. Security was already conspicuous on the streets outside, where temperatures climbed into the mid-90s.
Trump and Biden are not expected to arrive in Atlanta until Thursday. The stakes of their debate were underlined by events in the wider political world.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule any day now on Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
On Wednesday, the court delivered a win for the Biden administration when it upheld the government’s right to warn social media companies about posts that it considers misinformation. A separate judgment was posted, briefly and apparently in error, on an abortion-related case.
Meanwhile, a new poll from Quinnipiac University showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Biden nationally, 49 percent to 45 percent.
The margin in the new poll is bigger than most. Trump’s edge in the national polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) stands at 1.2 percentage points.
Trump also leads the DDHQ polling average in five of the six battleground states that are likely to determine the election’s outcome. Polling has typically underestimated Trump’s support in past elections, so it’s easy to see why betting markets have the former president as the favorite to prevail in November.
Those dynamics surely played a part in Biden’s willingness to debate at such an early point in the election cycle. Thursday’s debate is significantly earlier than any other in the television era.
A strong night for the 81-year-old Biden would ease concerns over his age and mental acuity — worries that extend to plenty of Democratic voters, according to polls.
Biden loyalists believe he can also bend the polling curve by tying Trump as closely as possible to the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, warning that the former president is a danger to American democracy and casting his opponent as a selfish figure, uninterested in solving voters’ problems.
Each side is also seeking to set the news agenda in the final hours before the debate.
The Biden campaign held a press conference at the Georgia state capitol Wednesday afternoon. The headline attraction was former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), who had endorsed Biden for reelection only hours before.
At the campaign event, Kinzinger was joined by former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) and Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer who was on duty on Jan. 6, 2021. Dunn lost a Democratic House primary in Maryland’s 3rd District last month.
Kinzinger contended that conscientious Republicans should set aside policy disagreements with Biden and vote Democratic this year in what he contends is “actually … the most important election of our lifetime.”
“There is a fight for democracy that, if we don’t buckle down and take seriously, we could easily lose,” Kinzinger warned.
Back in Washington, senior Republicans including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) amplified a Tuesday report from a GOP-led House subcommittee that reraised the infamous issue of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The report centered on an October 2020 open letter from 51 former senior intelligence officials that sought to cast the then-recent discovery of the laptop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The House subcommittee report contends that “high ranking CIA officials, up to and including then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, were made aware of the Hunter Biden statement prior to its approval and publication” — and that some of its signatories “were on active contract with the CIA at the time.”
Johnson said this amounts to new “irrefutable evidence that those connected with the Biden campaign directed an influence operation against American voters, just weeks before the 2020 election.”
Within the Trump camp, there is a keen appetite for Thursday’s debate, which aides believe the former president can use to expose Biden’s vulnerabilities, politically and personally.
Trump, though only three years younger than Biden, contends he is far more vigorous. Polls show that concerns about Trump’s age are fairly widespread, but less so than is the case with Biden.
Trump advisers also believe the debate can cast a harsh light on Biden’s record on inflation and immigration, in particular.
Inflation has fallen roughly two-thirds from its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent, but the pain of that earlier period inflicted a political wound for Biden that has yet to heal.
The Trump campaign’s top figures, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, wrote in a Wednesday memo that Biden would enter the debate “desperate to distract from the sputtering economy and open border.”
Trump, they promised, “looks forward to presenting his vision for a prosperous, safe and secure America.”
Yet, in the same memo, they also sought to dull the effect of any references from Biden to Trump’s recent conviction for 34 felonies.
In a race so close, in a nation so divided, any unscripted dramatic moment could have huge ramifications.
Thursday’s debate might provide it.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.