Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s town hall may have been a quiet, subdued affair compared to President Trump’s, but with an almost double-digit average polling lead, that’s unlikely to hurt his advantage 19 days before the election.
Biden did make news during his calm, two-hour town hall with ABC.
The two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator admitted it was a mistake to support the 1994 crime bill, maligned for its disproportionate impact on minority communities. He promised to clarify his position on court-packing before Nov. 3, depending on how the Senate handled Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation vote. And he tentatively backed a coronavirus vaccine mandate.
But that paled in comparison to the first 15 minutes of Trump’s frenetic, one-hour town hall on NBC.
During the starting quarter of his event, Trump insisted he didn’t “remember” taking a COVID-19 test before his opening debate against Biden, doubled down on his assertion that the country was “rounding the corner” regarding the pandemic, got into a testy exchange with host Savannah Guthrie over a question concerning white supremacy, and refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Yet ceding the political spotlight to Trump is a strategy that has helped Biden maintain an average lead of 9.8 percentage points with an electorate that seems to be pining for less chaotic times, according to RealClearPolitics.
Biden’s opening question came from a Democrat curious about what he would’ve done differently from Trump’s response to the outbreak had he been in the White House. The second query, from a former Trump supporter who’s now undecided, was whether he would make a COVID-19 vaccine mandatory.
“It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed,” he said. “We should be thinking about making a mandate.”
Reading from a cue card, he also fielded a question on his tax plan from another Republican. ABC host George Stephanopoulos followed up on whether Biden would postpone his tax cut proposal, given the economic pressure created by the virus.
“I’ve got to get the votes,” he said of Congress. “We’re a democracy, we need consensus.”
When pressed again by Stephanopoulos on whether it was a mistake to have drafted and pushed for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, he replied: “Yes, it was.”
Biden spent much of the primary distancing himself from the legislation’s unpopular provisions covering, for example, mandatory sentences, while contextualizing it in the “law and order” political environment of the 1990s.
“The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he added Thursday.
And when asked about court-packing, he corrected himself by saying voters did have the right to know where he stood on the issue and that he would be more specific depending on the rest of Barrett’s confirmation process.
“It depends on how this turns out,” he said, reiterating that he was not “a fan.”
The ABC town hall was hurriedly organized over the past week after Trump last Thursday blasted as “not acceptable” the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates’s unilateral decision to convert the scheduled Thursday meeting from in-person to virtual following the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis.
Biden’s campaign latched onto Trump’s complaints, using them as a reason to pull out of the negotiated debate. Instead, it opted to take part in the televised town hall as NBC aired a competing program with the president.
Scrapping the original plan provided Biden with the opportunity to connect with voters, supporters touting his empathy as his greatest strength, without being badgered by Trump like he was during their first debate on Sept. 29. The move, though, generated criticism because it denied voters another chance to assess the two nominees face to face.
Voters posed a series of more challenging questions to Biden during Thursday’s town hall in contrast to CNN’s iteration last month, also broadcast from Pennsylvania.
Public health measures helping mitigate the virus have allowed Biden to avoid taking unfiltered questions during the general election, particularly over the summer, when he would simply log on to digital events from his Delaware home amid the lockdowns.
Since Labor Day, however, Biden’s left a heavier footprint on the campaign trail, traveling to the crucial battlegrounds of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania just this week.
Biden and Trump will take the stage at Belmont University, Nashville, for their final debate on Oct. 22. Their last matchup before Nov. 3 will be moderated by NBC News’s Kristen Welker.
