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Biden Aced the Town Hall. Why Didn't Trump?
BloombergDonald Trump is lucky that presidential elections aren’t decided by televised town-hall meetings. If they were, after his effort on ABC on Tuesday and Joe Biden’s on CNN Thursday, Trump would be lucky to clear 100 electoral votes. It’s not that Biden was all that great — he was fine, but nothing special. It’s that Trump was that bad, and in ways that made his opponent look even better.
The secret of these events, in which candidates answer questions directly from voters, is that they’re easy. For one thing, voters tend to ask policy questions, not process ones, and they’re usually pretty straightforward — what are you going to do about such-and-such? Normal politicians can easily anticipate the topics, and usually have a prepared riff or a five-point plan to address them. Biden did some of that Thursday night. He’s not great at it, not nearly as strong as (for example) Senator Elizabeth Warren is. But he’s good enough. And he’s usually excellent at taking advantage of the other opportunity the format provides, which is to show the ability to connect with voters and empathize with them.
Trump is barely able to do either of these things. He did manage to demonstrate empathy a couple of times on Tuesday, but unfortunately in one case he misunderstood the questioner and thought that her mother had died from the pandemic when in fact she had died of cancer. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. It’s not just that he didn’t get emotional. He didn’t seem to be listening to the questions. So when the same woman asked about immigration, Trump immediately said that “we are doing something with immigration that I think is going to be very strong” but he never got around to saying what this “something” would be. Then he started talking about a vaccine and other medications for the virus.
It’s not that ducking questions is necessarily bad; Biden did so a couple of times on Thursday. But he did so by answering a somewhat different question on the same general topic, and in ways that at least connected back to the original. Trump just doesn’t know how to do that.
The secret of these events, in which candidates answer questions directly from voters, is that they’re easy. For one thing, voters tend to ask policy questions, not process ones, and they’re usually pretty straightforward — what are you going to do about such-and-such? Normal politicians can easily anticipate the topics, and usually have a prepared riff or a five-point plan to address them. Biden did some of that Thursday night. He’s not great at it, not nearly as strong as (for example) Senator Elizabeth Warren is. But he’s good enough. And he’s usually excellent at taking advantage of the other opportunity the format provides, which is to show the ability to connect with voters and empathize with them.
Trump is barely able to do either of these things. He did manage to demonstrate empathy a couple of times on Tuesday, but unfortunately in one case he misunderstood the questioner and thought that her mother had died from the pandemic when in fact she had died of cancer. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. It’s not just that he didn’t get emotional. He didn’t seem to be listening to the questions. So when the same woman asked about immigration, Trump immediately said that “we are doing something with immigration that I think is going to be very strong” but he never got around to saying what this “something” would be. Then he started talking about a vaccine and other medications for the virus.
It’s not that ducking questions is necessarily bad; Biden did so a couple of times on Thursday. But he did so by answering a somewhat different question on the same general topic, and in ways that at least connected back to the original. Trump just doesn’t know how to do that.
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