2nd Presidential Debate of 2016

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. So what can we expect in the second presidential debate of 2016? The big matchup is Sunday night between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Well, one of the exciting things about debates is you never really know what's going to happen. So if you want to be an honest, fair, objective analyst, you have to go in with somewhat of an open mind. However, having said that, there are certain trend lines you can see projected from one four year cycle to the next. One that is common is this idea that the frontrunner often stumbles in the first debate only to recover in the second. You saw that in 2012 with Barack Obama, who by all accounts was lost the first debate with Romney, but then did well and it seemed to have no impact on the campaign. Similarly, back in 1984, Ronald Reagan did a horrible job in his first debate, but did well in the second and it didn't seem to have any impact on the election. So I believe there are going to be many in the media just itching to write a story about, about how this is Trump's big comeback. The other factor in play, just institutionally when it comes to the media, they don't want to see a blowout. Right now, all the polling data since the first debate has trended towards Hillary Clinton. If you aggregate all the polls nationwide, she's sitting on a lead of about 5%. This means an electoral blowout. And folks, I'm not saying she's going to win in a landslide, but right now, current projections, when you aggregate all polling, it is in fact an electoral landslide. Popular vote landslides are defined typically as a 10% victory or not. And I don't think anyone's predicting really under any circumstances that either candidate's going to win by 10 points. But right now at 5%, that's about as close as you can get to a landslide in the current polarized environment. Now, I'm saying all of this even though it seems like it doesn't have that much to do with communication. Communication, it's the context that people are going to be viewing this debate through this particular lens. So what has to happen? Last time, by all accounts, even the supporters of Donald Trump, he was not prepared. He didn't really rehearse, he didn't prepare. And his performance wasn't that much different from a five minute press conference where he just kind of throws off a few zingers. That just doesn't work when you are doing a debate in prime time for 90 minutes with 80 plus million people watching you, he seemed woefully unprepared. He was entirely defensive the whole time. So I am going to make some predictions. Trump is someone who fancies himself as a fantastic communicator and indeed he does have certain communications, communication strengths. Obviously he has seen all the positive attention his running mate, Mike Pence received. And Pence did something that you can quibble whether it was intellectually honest, but from a media communication standpoint, it was effective. Pence simply never defended. He said what was good about his team's positions and what was bad about Hillary. He divided the world into good and bad, good and evil. My prediction is Trump is going to be much more disciplined about that. He is not going to spend time defending some of his more controversial statements. He's going to spend his time attacking Hillary much harder. Things like Benghazi that never even got mentioned in the first debate, he's going to attack her on that. He's going to attack her on email, he's going to attack her on foundation, he's going to attack her on the deplorable comments. This is my prediction. I could be wrong. It's often very difficult to predict what Donald Trump or any politician will do. Hillary Clinton's strategy, I think, has to be the same. She by all accounts did extraordinarily well in the first debate. She delivered her policies, she spoke in a conversational way. She didn't have that sort of yelling tone in her voice the way she has done in other speeches and in previous years campaigns. So I think she's a little easier to predict. She's going to need to do the same thing. This environment traditionally has been a better environment for her. She is known, even by her enemies, is someone who really is a good listener. And this is a town hall meeting format. So real, so called real people will be able to ask questions. Both candidates can look that person in the eye and be responsive to them. Now, an advantage Hillary has, but also could be seen as a disadvantage, is any policy question that comes up. She has such an intimate, detailed knowledge about that policy. There's always the danger she could go too deep or be too complex. One of the things Hillary Clinton is really not particularly good at is giving a nice crisp 30 second answer of tell us why your policy is great, tell us why these attacks on your policies are wrong. She's really not particularly good at that. Traditionally, Trump has been better about saying why he's great and in fact why the other person's policies are horrible, terrible. The worst ever in the world to use some of his favorite phrases. So what is going to happen? I think there is a certainly a chance that if Donald Trump doesn't do any better, then you see a widespread panic among conservatives, Republicans, the conservative media establishment. And then you would likely see a stampede of Republican congressional candidates, Senate candidates distance themselves from Trump, say that they're no longer supporting them, that they're not even voting for him because they're so afraid of going down in flames. With the Trump campaign, that is certainly a possibility. He lost about four points from the last debate. Anything similar and we really would be in landslide category. So that's something the Trump campaign and the whole Republican Party establishment has to be worried about. What does Trump have to do to have all the prognosticators and the pundits and the experts and the public say that he won? I think he's going to have to show a mastery of some detail, get some facts straight. There simply cannot be story after story about. Here are the 50 major facts Trump got wrong. Now he doesn't have to get everything right and no politician gets everything right and Hillary Clinton doesn't get everything right. But all of the post debate analysis can't be that this guy has learned nothing. He continues to get all of his facts wrong and he continues to lie. So he's somehow going to have to tighten up and stay on familiar ground. I think what he's going to have to do and what he's likely to do is just to narrow his focus to attacking Hillary Clinton's record and the Democratic administration Barack Obama record and to stick to things that strike most people as fair and strike independent voters as fair and have some factual basis in reality. If he hits her really hard and she seems annoyed, she seems flustered, he gets a few good one liners in and he doesn't seem flustered by her and he doesn't seem defensive and he just seems a lot better than the last time. There is a chance that all of the post debate analysis will say that Trump won much better. The standards are much, much lower for him right now because his first performance was so bad. If he can just sound intelligent, not be defensive, hit her in a hard, forceful way, there are going to be a lot of people primed to write that Trump won. What does Hillary Clinton have to do? Her playbook is very similar to the last time. She has to state what she wants to do, seem positive, upbeat, speak in a conversational way and not in a robotic way, use simple language, as simple as possible and she has to really make the case that Trump's positions are extreme and dangerous. She did that very well the first time. The Trump people know it's coming. It can't be that difficult, but that's what Hillary has to do. If she does that and gets him to seem flustered, to be overly defensive, then the post debate analysis will say that again, she has won. It's unlikely that it will be quite as lopsided as the first time. I have a hard time imagining Trump won't recalibrate and somehow do better than he did the first. If nothing else, he'll take some cold medicine or antihistamine so he's not sniffing so much, which seemed a wild distraction to a lot of people. So we'll see. I will be analyzing the debate thoroughly right here after the debate on Sunday night. So please stay tuned. I'll see you then. Now, in other news, a lot going on this week. As always here at the program, speaking with TJ Walker, we try to analyze not from a political perspective, although obviously that bleeds in. What I try to do is really analyze major events, newsmaking events from the perspective of communication. What is really going on? How does someone communicate? What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? So that's what we're trying to do in this particular show. As always, I'm happy to take any suggestions from you if there are topics you want me to address. We're about to really gear up and start having a lot of interesting, fascinating guests for you in the coming months. So I'm very, very excited about that. So please get ready to stay tuned for that. And as always, we take your questions as well. I want to take a question came in earlier today. This is from one of my online students. Jacob writes in hi, TJ as an attorney, how do I confine an opening statement to only five points when I have a few dozen points that I need to convey? And Jacob's presentation opportunity as an attorney, a little different from most people. Now, I don't know if he's speaking to a jury or just to a judge or both. But speaking in a courtroom is different from a typical speech, business presentation, politician presentation in that there can be a transcript, you can have a court stenographer writing down everything you say. And there are times when the jury is going to be instructed to go back and reread what was said in court. So you can sometimes go into more detail. You can cover more points, you can bring out more facts. Here's the challenge, though. I have For Jacob, and that is, if you're really trying to convey a dozen points, what evidence do you have that your audience, meaning the judge or jury, will remember them? Sure, you can perhaps go deeper than the recommended five points of a presentation, but a couple of dozen that would mean 24 at least strikes me as overly ambitious and, in fact, greedy. Here's my recommendation, Jacob. If you have an opening statement for a trial jury, then practice your statement. Find two or three colleagues, maybe an intern, maybe someone who shares office space down the corner from you, and deliver your opening statement at lunchtime. And then when you're done, ask them what they remember. I guarantee you they're not going to remember 24 points. So to me, it's not communication if it comes out of your mouth. It's not communication if people understand it, it's only communication if they remember it, can therefore act on it. You need either the judge or jury or both to remember your points so they can convict or acquit. That's the point of it. So test it. That's the don't take my word for it, but don't just go through all the facts, because those are all the facts. You need to test to see what is effective, and you need to put it in priority. As Mark Twain once said and a lot of other wits have said, I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to send you a short letter. It's actually easier in some ways lazier to cover 24 points than it is to cover five points. So really give some thought to what is going to be most effective? What are the points that are most likely to really, truly move the jury and judge? I'd rather you go deeper into that. Really just burn a hole in people's memories. It's so powerful than to just cover everything, because when you cover everything, quite often you cover nothing in other news. Fascinating example, I think, of what not to do by New York City's mayor Bill de Blasio, folks. By the way, sometimes I'm accused of being partisan and given partisan analysis and somehow being tougher on Republicans. Well, here's a Democrat, a liberal, progressive Democrat. I have consistently rated him a very poor communicator. And this just shows. Once again, he falls into the trap. Bill de Blasio was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager long ago when she ran for the Senate. He then got onto the city council in New York and then got elected to mayor a few years ago. And unfortunately, he's constantly picking fights with the media that are simply unproductive. He questions their questions. He critiques their questions. He acts like he's the journalism professor, which I would be fine with if it actually helped him, but it ends up being a distraction. And just yesterday, he got into a fight at a press conference with the New York Post, called it a right wing rag, says he has no use for it. And hey, I can understand someone calling the New York Post a right wing rag because it is a right wing rag. But what I don't understand is, is how the mayor of New York City thinks that is going to help him. All he did was fuel the beast. You've heard the expression, don't feed the trolls on Twitter and the Internet. Well, if you're mayor of the biggest, most important city in the country, your trolls are not just some guy with 20 Twitter followers. Your troll is some of the major tabloids. So what did the New York Post do with this? Did they say, oh, okay, he's criticizing us. Let's tone it down and be fair? Well, of course they didn't. Their headline today is dewazio, as in a little baby wang. So they have the picture of the mayor, his head on top of a little baby in a high chair throwing his milk is rattled. And the headline is Dawazio Rattled Mayor Lashes out at Post. Awww. Do we hurt your feelings? Now, I'm not suggesting that there were an awful lot of New York Post readers who also loved de Blasio in the first place, but that just doesn't help. De Blasio needs to do a better job of actually focusing on questions on his own terms and answering questions in a way that no matter how they are edited, they make him look good. Any good media trainer can do that. And it just is bizarre to me that someone could get this high in politics, work at the highest level of national politics before that, and be so utterly clueless about how to handle himself at a press conference. But there you have it. Classic example of what not to do. Folks, thanks for listening today, and please tune in bright and early Monday morning. I will be bringing to you full analysis and commentary of the 2016 second Republican Democrat debate. It's gonna be fun. I'm TJ Walker. See you then. Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walk.