The debate has been described as chaos, unruly, of no value and of frightening a CNN analyst. It was not what a debate should be said Rachel Maddow of MSNBC of dispassionately looking at policy and informing the electorate and I surmise the uncommitted, the non-voters, the swing voters and independents who sit in a 20% twilight zone. Sir Robert Jones also came out against Trump as uncouth, an ignoramus and a liar. < Biden was also short on truth.

Politics is also about power, not just propriety and civility. Democrat civility for example in US Supreme Court appointments Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Brett Kavanagh and now Amy Coney Barret and 2001 Federal Court appointee Miguel Estrada (‘he’s a Latino’https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/24/charles-hurt-donald-trump-should-nominate-miguel-estrada-to-supreme-court/) have hardly been treated with propriety, civility or decency or a nod to diversity.

The debate was a paradigm shift which the MSM did not pick up on. The shift was from debating the issues and policies to targeting the candidates’ bases. The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Kimberley Strassel and Dan Bogino in his YouTube Podcast both explain the shift in easy terms and Bongino backs it up with clips from the debate.

The Trump’s election strategists- and credit to them- have properly worked out that the lines are well-drawn and people are mostly decided. Thus as Strassel and Bongino think the tactic is to excite the candidate's base and undermine the opposing candidate's base. The execution was imperfect if not flawed in places.

Trump also needed to get points out. For example, on left-wing violence as the moderator fed the white supremacist narrative. A trope deployed in 2016. Given BLM and Antifa (a flat structured network not an “idea” per se) are Marxist driven. Ann Coulter in her column observed that raising white supremacy “.. would be as if, on the morning after Pearl Harbour, the League of Nations demanded that FDR condemn American aggression in the Pacific." The need to get points out is a consequence of MSM in the US and its copy and paste followers here to properly report the news.

The President attacked Biden’s base in four instances and got Biden to distance himself from the harder line left in the Democrat Party. The Democrats are a house divided and Biden represents the old-style moderate Democrats as opposed to Kamala Harris and also to the Occasio-Cortez’s Squad of Democratic Socialists. AOC has stated that Biden can be pushed further left. Biden was the nominee in 'no man's land.'

Trump obtained concessions from Biden, for example, to mention two: on the Democratic Socialists Green Deal he said that he had his own but his web site says he supports the AOC Green Deal; that he was the Democratic Party and distanced himself from the Sander’s Bernie Bros. Bongino notes that on the concessions Trump stated several times ‘you have lost the left.’ Biden did tumble to the game plan but it was too late.

As Strassel says Biden “had to distance himself from policies that are baseline progressive demands--Medicare for All, defund police, Green New Deal, (Never forget the D party is seriously divided.” The cost of distancing for those in the Democratic base who want systemic change and revolution in this election cycle would have to consider their trust undermined by Biden. If that is so Trump's strategy may pay dividends.

Trump could advance a law and order, (which has garnered 5 Democratic mayoral endorsements in Minnesota! And police union support) the economy, the FBI investigation, which is unravelling at a pace this week and Hunter Biden's money connections with Russia and China and the conflict of interest that potentially raises.

If we accept (1) Helmut Norpoth’s (“professor of political science at Stony Brook University. Norpoth is best known for developing the Primary Model, which has correctly predicted five of the six previous US elections) analysis of Primaries and he picked Trump as a winner in 2016, and (2) the Princeton Research that suggests from the research of race riots since 1968 that the areas around riot areas turn to the GOP for law; and order (3) noting that the polls are erratic and unreliable, then the Election Die may already be cast.

Graham Hill
2 October 2020