A big night, but will it matter?
President Biden wasn’t even halfway through his 68-minute State of the Union address when Simon Rosenberg, the rare Democratic strategist optimistic about Biden’s reelection prospects, shot off a note to readers of his Substack newsletter.
“The president is kicking ass!” it said (although there were many more exclamation points). The Biden campaign quickly reported that the three hours surrounding the primetime speech were the most lucrative fundraising hours of the president’s reelection campaign to date.
The stirring speech, at least for Democrats worried about Biden’s reelection prospects, was a welcome success — and on a night when it mattered. There will be only one moment before Election Day when Biden can be assured of an uninterrupted block of time to speak to such a large voter audience: his acceptance speech for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Yet the rules of campaigning are changing in this era of fragmented media markets and political polarization, in a battle between two candidates so familiar to the electorate and loathed by so many voters. These key moments are no longer the reliable move-the-needle events they once were. Undecided voters can be precisely targeted in many ways, with TikTok being the most common au courant example.
These elections will be decided by a small number of voters in just a handful of states. There is little reason to believe that many of them spent 68 minutes on Thursday night watching Biden speak to Congress.
“I doubt this will move the vote with swing voters: too early,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. “But for those concerned about their age, his strength last night should help create a consent structure for them to vote for him.”
More than 32 million people watched the State of the Union address last night, 18 percent more than last year’s audience. That’s a huge audience anyway, even if the pews were filled with voters already inclined to support Biden.
“You have a crowd that’s comparable to a big playoff game in the NFL,” said Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary for Obama. “It is reasonable to assume that not every viewer is looking for new information. But the size of the audience should be important to any candidate.”
Yet such moments are often forgotten by the time Election Day arrives. “There is no evidence that a State of the Union address this late in a presidency can be so consequential as to change the trajectory of a reelection campaign,” said Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster.
Viral moments — to use an unkind example, when the president stumbled while walking up the stairs to Air Force One — tend to have much more staying power.
There may be another high-profile moment for Biden and Trump before Election Day: the presidential debates, assuming they happen. Trump has challenged Biden to a series of general election debates, though nothing is planned; Trump declined to participate in any of the Republican primaries.
A debate would be very different from a convention or State of the Union address: Biden and Trump would share a stage, in front of one or more questioners, and presumably a large audience, on a date much closer to Election Day, when the remaining undecided voters begin to make up their minds.
“Debates can have consequences, and in this race between Trump and Biden, too,” McInturff said. “It could help voters decide whether Biden is ready for a second term and whether Trump can deliver a governing agenda.”
The ultimate question for Biden and Trump is whether voters are saturated with information about their candidacies. Do they already know everything they want or need to know about the two men who each spent time in the White House?
“Right now people are turned off,” says Plouffe. “That’s a very important question for the president: Are they swing voters, young voters — are they still open to hearing from him? My suspicion is yes. But that is an open question.”
Two speeches, two Americas
On Tuesday evening, a triumphant Donald Trump looked out on an adoring crowd at his seaside mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He evoked the glorious days of his presidency, when, according to his stories, there were no wars and the nation was universally admired and united in egalitarian prosperity. Then he declared: “Our country is dying.”
Two days later, President Biden looked at a sharply divided audience and conjured up the mirror image: a country that is now “literally the envy of the world.” He described the recent past as “one of the toughest periods in the country’s history,” when crime was soaring, a deadly virus was raging and the country’s president had “failed the most fundamental presidential duty” – “the duty to to take care of’.
With the presidential elections in full swing, two speeches two days apart laid out the choice facing voters, with diametrically opposed visions of the past, present and future. But both men seemed to share the political goal of rallying their own voters, rather than the more traditional task of pivoting to the center to appeal to witches and enemies.
In this tale of two speeches, both were strikingly partisan, delivered by a pair of older politicians who began their general election rematch with nods to their age, hyperbolic warnings about this moment in history, prescriptions for the future – Trump’s vague, Biden’s specific one. to a portion of chips – and visions for the nation that are as different as possible.
“I see a future for all Americans,” Biden’s speech concluded. “I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be a president for all Americans because I believe in America.”
Trump’s finale struck a different tone.
“We’re going to have to deport a lot of people, a lot of bad people,” he said in closing his 20-minute speech, “because our countries can’t live like this, our cities are suffocating, our states are dying and, frankly, our country is dying, and we are going to make America great again.”
—Jonathan Weisman
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