Why Joe Biden won the final debate
In Nashville on Thursday night Donald Trump and Joe Biden fought to a draw on the debate stage — which means that Biden won, and won big. That's because he holds a national polling lead of nearly ten points, he's been leading solidly on every day of the campaign from the beginning, the election is less than two weeks away, and the president did nothing in their final confrontation that's likely to change the shape of the race.
Not that he didn't try. Trump came out swinging and was his usual rude, mendacious, and petulant self. But he wasn't quite the rampaging, appallingly boorish jerk he chose to be at the first debate three weeks ago in Cleveland. He frequently talked over moderator Kristen Welker and insisted on speaking longer than his allotted time, but he dialed back the aggressiveness just enough to keep from coming off as a thug and a bully. For that reason, I doubt his numbers will sink in the way they did right after the candidates sparred in late September.
Biden was better this time, too. Without Trump constantly talking over him and spewing a nonstop torrent of lies, he was able to formulate cogent responses to questions and the barrage of attacks from his opponent. He also managed to go on the offense with the president over the pandemic, health care, foreign policy, climate change, and other subjects. Biden's best moment came midway through when Trump attempted, as he did in the first debate, to portray the former vice president as more left-wing than he is. This prompted Biden to respond sharply, referring to his 20-odd opponents during the Democratic primaries, many of whom were to his left, "[Trump is] a very confused guy... he thinks he's running against someone else. He's running against Joe Biden. I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them."
The strangest moments of the evening came when Trump tried repeatedly to invoke the series of murky stories about the business dealings of the Democrat's son, Hunter Biden, that have appeared in The New York Post and in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal over the past week or so. These stories have all the hallmarks of a Roger Stone-inspired dirty-tricks sliming operation. Their sourcing is murky and they insinuate wrongdoing on Joe Biden's part that never quite gets substantiated. But that didn't keep Trump from referring conspiratorially to elements of the stories involving Ukraine, China, money, payments, and percentages in a way that surely dumbfounded nearly every person watching the debate.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/why-joe-biden-won-the-final-debate/ar-BB1ajMtv?li=BBnb7Kz
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