Who Will Win the Debate?

According to Ben Shapiro, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, the “2024 election is Donald Trump’s to lose.” Donald Trump and Joe Biden are running even in the national polls. Shapiro noted that Trump is running ahead of Biden in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. He is running even in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He is within striking distance in Minnesota and New Hampshire. 

As the polls show Trump gaining on Biden, they also show that “Biden’s approval ratings are stagnant … below 40%. Americans appear stuck in their views and “unlikely to change dramatically before the election.”

No matter how good it looks for Trump, it does not necessarily mean that he will win the election. The debate scheduled for tomorrow night, June 27, 2024, could be a turning point. The debate may change some opinions, or at least change the focus.

So far, the race has been about Biden. No new information has been added to the litany of criticisms against Trump since 2021. Meanwhile, Biden has been the president – and he’s been doing a terrible job of it, setting things on fire both at home and abroad. He’s also in a state of obvious mental and physical decline.

But the debate could shift the focus back to Trump. Obviously, that’s Biden’s plan – and the plan of the interlocutors at CNN.

As George Stephanopoulos recently told CNN’s Abby Phillip, the “most important question” is whether Trump will accept the results of the 2020 election as legitimate. “If you can’t pass that fundamental threshold of saying, “Yes the last election was not stolen,’ two, ‘I will abide by the results of the next election,’ then I think that’s all voters and viewers need to know,” said Stephanopoulos.

Presumably, Biden and anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will follow that advice. Which means that Trump had better have an answer that shifts the focus away from his views of 2020 and back toward 2024. He ought to say:

We disagree on what happened in the 2020 election. I believe, for example, that your Democratic colleagues changed a lot of the voting rules in shocking ways, and that you and your friends in the media covered up a story about your son’s corruption, even though they knew it was true. But none of that matters much to the American people. What matters is now. Today. 2024. You’re the president, regardless of what I think happened in 2020. And you’ve been awful, which is why you’re losing.

Keeping the focus on Biden will be key. If asked about Jan. 6 – which he surely will be – Trump should respond:

Joe, you’ve said I’m a threat to democracy because I don’t believe I lost the 2020 election. Well, Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe she lost the 2016 election, and that’s apparently just fine. In reality, you’re the threat to democracy: You’ve sicced your political allies on me in the courts, used OSHA to try to mandate vaccines for 80 million Americans, violated the Constitution to try to let people skate on their student loan debt, and violated your constitutional oath by keeping the border open and letting through 7 million illegal immigrants. Americans care less about Jan. 6, 2021, than Nov. 5, 2024.

Shapiro believes that the “election is Trump’s to lose.” Shapiro’s counsel is for Trump to keep the focus steadily and calmly on Biden – regardless of what Trump believes about the 2020 election.