Nothing compelled Trump to agree to a June debate.
There is no question that the single biggest mistake of the 2024 election was Joe Biden’s stubborn, deluded insistence upon running again. That denied the Democrats the chance for an open primary that might have produced a different candidate — one better prepared to get distance from the unpopular Biden administration, and unconnected to the coverup of Biden’s declining capabilities. In the end, Biden’s decision didn’t even deliver the one thing it promised: the stability of an incumbent reelection.
But today’s news cycle on the extent of Biden’s decline is a good occasion to reflect upon the second-biggest mistake of the cycle: Donald Trump’s acceptance of the Biden campaign’s unprecedented request for a debate in June.
It’s easy for winning campaigns to wave away their mistakes. In fact, it seems clear in retrospect that some of the errors by Trump and his campaign ended up being harmless. He may have blown a few days of news cycles by the unforced errors of having a roast comic at the Madison Square Garden rally, or by attacking Brian Kemp in August, but there’s no sign that he actually suffered for either of those. Nobody runs a flawless campaign, and victory can cover a lot of sins.
The timing of the debate is another story. Nothing compelled Trump to agree to a June debate. Had he waited until September, and had Biden performed as badly as he did, it would have been too late to get Biden out of the race. That almost certainly would have led to a big drag on Democratic enthusiasm. At the time, Trump’s lead in the polls across several swing states widened significantly from June 28 to July 22: from 1.9 to three points in the national polls, 0.5 to 2.1 points in Michigan, 2.8 to 5.6 points in Nevada, 2.8 to 4.5 points in Pennsylvania, and tied to 3.3 points in Wisconsin. True, the race was remarkably stable, reflecting the voters’ built-in views of Trump and Biden, and it ended up around where it was in July when Biden dropped out. But that’s just the raw numbers; consider what the dynamics of the race would have looked like if Biden face-planted that badly in the fall, on the eve of the opening of early voting, with no plan to replace him, after a full year of his campaign insisting that he was fine. By contrast, Trump’s own poor debate performance in September was only noticeable because he was no longer facing Biden.
As I noted at the time, a genuine Biden collapse could lead to a rout for Democrats in the Senate. Instead, while it was a good night for Republicans, it could have been a lot better. Five Senate races were decided by 2.4 points or less, and Democrats won four of them — in the hotly contested presidential swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. They also won by wider but single-digit margins in Virginia and New Jersey, both states where the presidential margins were much closer than in 2020. Looking at the House, Republicans lost 22 races by under five points, and ended up with just a five-seat majority to show for winning a national popular majority in House races.
A counterargument might be twofold. First, Trump did the nation a service by running a mentally declining elder out of the race as soon as possible and by then proceeding to destroy the political futures of both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. But that’s not much of a political strategy argument. Harris’s weaknesses are such that they would have been equally on display had she run fresh in 2028. Second, Harris had some political vulnerabilities that Biden didn’t, such as more difficulty with young men and the statements that Trump used to such effect in his ads on transgender surgery funding. But while that compensated partly for the mistake, it seems clear nonetheless that Harris suffered more from the drag of Biden and his record than she did from her own vulnerabilities, and had Biden had to stagger his way to November, he would not have had even the modicum of base enthusiasm that Harris was able to muster in order to stave off a wider collapse.
When you win, you can feel that you got away with some big mistakes. But we shouldn’t turn the page on the 2024 election without recording that this was a very big one, and it may have cost Republicans a bunch of seats in the Senate and the House that they will live to regret losing.