Joe Biden, unless he has some huge brain fart, is going to win the debates. But it’s not likely to help him very much, for two reasons. So I would caution his campaign against thinking they can lock this thing down with solid debate performances.
My advice would be: Rather than trying to win the debates, Biden should give Donald Trump the room to lose them. I’ll explain what I mean by that below, but first, let’s get to those reasons.
Reason one why winning won’t matter much is that everyone expects him to win. This may sound kind of odd given how shaky he was in those early debates, but I think we can agree in retrospect that that was because he was on a stage with 15 other people who were all attacking him. By the time he got one-on-one with Bernie, he did very well. And in that recent town hall, he was terrific. There were a couple uh-oh moments, but he put on his boots and slogged his way through them.