TJ Walker breaks down the second 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. He cites historical precedent from 1984 and 2012, notes Clinton's 5-point polling lead, and predicts how each candidate's performance could shift the post-debate narrative and GOP response.
Questions this video answers
October 7, 2016.
About 5%.
About four points.
Chapters
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 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 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 or 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. 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 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 and 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 as someone who really is a good listener. And this is a town hall meeting format, so 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 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 with 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.
