Power Up: Trump’s debate performance was described this way by undecided voters: ‘Crackhead,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘un-American,’ ‘forceful’

Undecided voters from battleground states around the country used decidedly different words to describe the night featuring the Republican and Democratic nominees on the same stage for the first time. 

• ‘Crackhead,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘un-American,’ ‘forceful,’ ‘puzzling,’ ‘eh,’ and ‘unhinged’ were some of the words used to describe Trump’s performance by a group of undecided voters in GOP pollster Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group Zoom session. 
• ‘Professional,’ ‘showed restraint and compassion,’ ‘predictable,’ ‘politician,’ and ‘presidential’ were the descriptors used to describe Biden by the same participants in Luntz’s group, which comprised of over a dozen undecided voters from Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, and North Carolina.

Some in the group remained undecided and eager to see more from the candidates while others were so repelled by Trump’s performance, they immediately made up their minds. There was clear agreement that Trump’s chaotic behavior, incessant interruptions and personal attacks did not help his reelection argument.

Trump’s most problematic moment of the debate, according to the voters, was overwhelmingly his refusal to condemn white supremacy and militia groups that have appeared in protests in cities around the country.

• “What do you want to call it?” Trump asked, seeking clarification on what he should be condemning after asked by Wallace whether he would do so. “Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by,” Trump said, before quickly pivoting, “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
• “That was definitely his worst moment … it’s literally the easiest thing he could accomplish and he still didn’t do it right,” Travis, an undecided voter from Arizona, told Luntz.
• “He will not denounce anyone who supports him and that was on display today,” said Joe, another Arizona person on the fence.
• Katie from Iowa interrupted to defend Trump, citing his recent pledge to designate the Ku Klux Klan and antifa as terrorist organizations.
• “He’s had four years to denounce them and he’s declined to do that,” Joe responded.

The president’s response aligns with his past refusal to denounce white supremacists and blame Democrats for violence in American cities riven by protests against police brutality. As our colleague Ashley Parker noted, “Trump’s previous refusals to disavow white supremacy are among the few times his numbers have really taken a hit.” Trump’s approach stands in stark contrast to comments from his own FBI director earlier in September: 

• Christopher A. Wray told Congress  that “racially motivated extremism makes up the largest share of the FBI’s domestic terrorism cases, and that white supremacist ideology appears to drive the bulk of those racially motivated extremism cases.”
• Trump’s private and public musings about Black and Jewish Americans and Hispanics have created a “substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words,” our colleague Greg Miller reported.

Facts, please: Luntz’s focus group also expressed frustration and confusion about Trump’s unfounded diatribe against mail-in voting. The dark line of attack on the national stage – that absentee ballots are “being sold, they’re being dumped in rivers:” – prompted questions about the integrity of the election. Some of the participants requested that Fox News or Wallace provide more fact checking and insight to help them parse through the onslaught of claims.

• “Is the votes are in the trash can a real story?” Rob from Iowa asked. “If that’s happening at all, that needs to stop… If it’s in the trash can? Yep then it needs to stop.”
• “I don’t believe in that,” Jennifer from Pennsylvania said of absentee voting. “It’s bogus and things will get lost… I don’t trust it.”
• Jeremy from Arizona, however, praised the electoral system for its ease and efficiency: “Arizona is a red state and we don’t have issues with mail-in voting so why aren’t we expressing that sentiment elsewhere and telling the good stories about how it works?”
• The facts: The rate of potentially fraudulent ballots is miniscule. “… a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent,” our colleague Elise Viebeck reported earlier this year.
• How do you vote in your state? Click right here.

It was unclear, however, whether Biden had done enough to persuade undecideds in the group to choose him as their candidate. Kimberly, a Black woman from Ohio, delivered a powerful monologue saying the squabbling between the two candidates — and lack of policy discussion —  risked “turning off a lot of people to the point where a lot a lot of people don’t want to vote.” 

• “And no vote is a vote for Mr. Trump,” Kimberly added. “So we gotta be smarter than that. My advice is stay focused and stay away from the behavior that Trump does …. A lot of people are going to be turned off. If they were gonna vote for him, maybe tonight they’d say, you know what I’m not voting for him at all.”
• “In my community, a lot of us are undecided,” said Kimberly. “Because we are darned if we do, darned if we don’t,” she added, before describing the systemic discrimination and racism she encounters on a daily basis that she said neither candidate has yet to address. “I need someone to tell me how they’re going to deal with the Black agenda to help us start moving forward. We’re not asking for handouts, we’re looking for an equal playing field.”
• “They were both bickering at each other like two old men in a nursing home,” Travis said, advising Biden to focus less on Trump and more on introducing his own policy proposals in the next debate.
• “What I want to see in the next debate is why should Joe be elected — not why shouldn’t I vote for Trump,” said Jeremy from Arizona.
• Joe from Arizona defended Biden’s counterpunches: “I don’t like incivility but I do get it — he’s trying to get people who hate Trump but don’t necessarily like Biden — and they’re like, ‘yes — go get him Uncle Joe.’”

However, Biden did appear to benefit from Trump’s pre-debate attacks  on his mental and physical acuity. Several participants remarked they were surprised Biden’s apparent strength.

• “I was surprised at how Biden did — based on what the media made him out to be … he did well,” Rob from Iowa commented.
• Joe from North Carolina said he needs to “see another debate to confirm Biden’s ability to stand up to Trump,” calling his performance “strong but not strong enough for me to make a decision.”
• Ruthie from Pennsylvania, a previously undecided voter who Biden won over, dismissed the importance of whether someone can stand up to Trump: “It’s just irrelevant — it’s like me thinking it’s relevant that I can win an argue with a crackhead. That doesn’t matter.”
• “I raised my hand for Trump but I’m thinking harder and I want to know if I can change that?” Jennifer from Pennsylvania asked. “I’m thinking Biden seemed to show more composure. I’m so torn. I can’t wait for the next debate. ”

From Cook Report’s national editor on Trump:

THEY CHECKED 21 CLAIMS. HERE’S A FEW OF THE HIGHLIGHTS: 

• Mail-in voting will not lead to “fraud like you’ve never seen.”: “As usual, Trump offered a baseless conspiracy theory that widespread use of mail ballots during an infectious-disease pandemic would lead to massive voter fraud. There is simply no evidence for these claims.”
• Biden does not support the Green New Deal: “The Green New Deal is a non-binding resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and other Democrats that calls for cutting carbon emissions to net-zero over 10 years while making steep investments in green infrastructure.”
• Drug prices will not “be coming down 80 or 90 percent”: “There is just no evidence for this pie-in-the-sky prediction. In fact, prescription drug prices are up 3 percent since Trump’s first full month in office through August, according to the consumer price index.”

CNN’s fact checker extraordinaire summed up Trump’s statements as an “avalanche of lying”:

👀: The New York Times’s fact-checking team also kept tabs on Trump’s claims, too: 

• “The president insisted that he paid ‘millions of dollar’  in federal income taxes during 2016 and 2017. In fact, tax documents obtained by [Times] show that in both years, Mr. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes. Mr. Biden repeatedly prodded the president to release his tax returns for those years. In response, Mr. Trump said ‘you’ll see it as soon as it’s finished, you’ll see it’ — a promise he has repeatedly made and broken since becoming a candidate.”
• “We’ve had no negative effect and we’ve had 35-40,000 people.” False. “Mr. Trump claimed his rallies have had ‘no negative effect’ because of the coronavirus and that as many as 35,000 or 40,000 people have attended the events. Both are untrue, as is a separate claim that his rallies have all been held outdoors.” the Times’s Michael Shear reports. 
• “Young children aren’t. Even younger people aren’t.” False. “The president was referring to the relative risks to young people from the coronavirus,” the Times’s Apoorva Mandavilli reports. “The vast majority of children do not become visibly ill when infected with the coronavirus. But while a strong immune system may protect them from becoming sick, they are far from immune. Several studies have shown that children can get infected and harbor high levels of the coronavirus. And a small proportion of children seem to develop a condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a severe and sometimes deadly overreaction of the immune system.”

Banning cows and airplanes is not part of the Green New Deal, despite what Trump says:

• Violent crime has not gone up under Trump: “Biden did not nail his usual talking point, so this turns out to be false. In discussing his record, he often mentions violent crime. But when he discusses Trump, he talks about murders. This selective presentation puts Biden in the best possible light and Trump in the worst,” our Post colleagues reported.
• We do not ‘have a higher deficit with China now than we did before’: “The trade deficit in goods and services with China climbed to $380 billion from 2017 to 2018, but then, because of Trump’s tariff war, fell to $308 billion in 2019, according to the Commerce Department. The trade deficit has continued to fall below 2019 levels in the first half of 2020,” they said.

WALLACE FACES HARSH REVIEWS: “With a pugilistic Trump relentlessly interrupting his opponent, [Biden], Wallace struggled to keep the proceedings coherent, reduced at times to pleading with the president to pause and allow the Democratic presidential nominee to speak,” the New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum reports.

• Many pointed out there was little he could do: “The 90-minute debate fell, almost immediately, into chaos and cross-talking, not because Wallace isn’t a capable broadcast interviewer but because Trump was out of control,” Margaret Sullivan writes. “Wallace needed, at the very least, a mute button. Maybe something stronger. A penalty box? A stun gun?”

A number of prominent anchors and personalities questioned if additional debates would be worthwhile: “Can we really have two more of these debates with the type of behavior that was displayed tonight?” Norah O’Donnell said on CBS News, Elahe Izadi reports.

• Biden’s team quickly reaffirmed its commitment to showing up: “Yes, Joe Biden’s going to show up,” Kate Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager, said on a call with reporters after the debate. “He’s going to continue speaking directly to the American people.”

“Will you shut up, man?”: Biden clearly had enough. The former vice president lit into the president, though there was disagreement on whether it even mattered based on just how far Trump went.

If you want to know how Biden’s team felt about it: 

Hillary Clinton had some thoughts, too:

Courting trouble?: Biden again refused to say whether he would support expanding the Supreme Court at least partially in retaliation if Republicans are able to speed through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. 

Low blow: “…no moment illustrated Trump’s determination to bend the debate to his will at all costs than when he wrenched Biden’s tribute to his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, into an attack on the business dealings of Biden’s other son, Hunter,” Politico’s Christopher Cadelago and Elena Schneider report. 

• “I don’t know Beau,” Trump snickered when Biden brought up his deceased son who served in Iraq. He then hit an even lower mark by attacking Hunter Biden’s past drug use.
• “Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use,” Trump continued, even as Biden tried to interrupt, calling it “not true.” (Hunter was discharged from the military, but not dishonorably).
• Biden’s honest reply to Trump’s deeply personal attacks seemed to resonate with many: “My son, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

The last word: “No one alive has ever seen a presidential debate like Tuesday night’s unseemly shout fest between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden — 90 minutes of invective, interruptions and personal insults. It was an insult to the public as well, and a sad example of the state of American democracy five weeks before the election,” Dan Balz reports.

• “It was an exhausting mess that spun beyond moderator Chris Wallace’s control and outside the bounds of anything that could reasonably be called a debate. It was a 90-minute display of a president’s testosterone-fueled, unmanaged rage and insecurity,” our Robin Givhan writes. 
• “I think President Trump went in to dominate. Whether that’s a good or bad strategy, they’ll have to decide later,” Trump ally Newt Gingrich said on Fox News, according to our Josh Dawsey.  “It was, in the words of Chris Christie, who coached Trump for the debates at the White House in recent days, ‘too hot.’” 
• “’I think the president overplayed his hand tonight,’ former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said, as other commentators on CNN looked on, “per Dawsey.

Here’s a sampling from best of the Twitter gallery:

Some people just felt for Wallace:

There was one constant: Biden raked in more money:

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW: 

ICE is set to target “sanctuary” jurisdictions: “The Trump administration is preparing an immigration enforcement blitz next month that would target arrests in U.S. cities and jurisdictions that have adopted ‘sanctuary; policies …,” Nick Miroff and Devlin Barrett report.

Homicide charges were not presented to grand jury in Breonna Taylor case: “Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) did not recommend murder charges to the grand jury considering evidence against the police officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor, he said amid growing criticism of his handling of the case,” Hannah Knowles and Marisa Iati report.

• Cameron recommended the grand jury indict one officer on charges of wanton endangerment for firing bullets that entered neighboring apartments, but said the other two officers, whose bullets struck Taylor, were “justified in their acts.”

Jim Comey is back on the Hill: “Senate Republicans’ election-season gambit to scrutinize the 2016 investigation of Trump’s campaign resumes [today] with public testimony from former FBI director James B. Comey, and as one of the president’s chief allies on Capitol Hill warns that a ‘day of reckoning” is coming,’” Karoun Demirjian reports.

• Right on time: there are also new unconfirmed claims about Clinton: “Sen Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) released a letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stating that Obama administration officials were briefed on a Russian intelligence analysis alleging that Clinton, authorized; a campaign plan to stir up a scandal’ against Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russians’ hack of Democrats’ emails. In the letter, Ratcliffe acknowledged that the intelligence community is uncertain if the information in that analysis was accurate.”