Biden Should Pull a Trump and Skip the Debates | Opinion

Donald ditched the Republicans and Joe should ditch Donald.

Despite skipping last week's first primary debate in Milwaukee and hinting that he may not debate at all in the primary, former President Donald Trump and his team reportedly view fall 2024 debates with President Biden as "the key to winning."

Without question, Biden should deny Trump this opportunity.

Trump's decision to skip last week's debate made strategic sense. Why give a bunch of runners-up, has-beens, and never-going-to-bes—most of whom have as much of a shot at being the next president as my Labrador retriever—oxygen, a platform, and higher ratings at this stage of the primary. This same logic is why incumbent presidents haven't participated in primary debates in decades.

But the reason Biden should skip debating Trump is far different. It is not that he is so far ahead it is not worth giving Trump the oxygen. Far from it. It's that Trump has no intention of using a debate to discuss the future of Social Security and Medicare, the economy, or the details of foreign policy and America's role in the world. Rather, Trump wants to use the debates to amplify his lies, distract from his legal troubles, and stoke chaos.

To say Trump has a casual relationship with the truth and reality is the understatement of the year. While in office, The Washington Post documented that Trump told more than 30,000 lies. According to the Post's analysis, Trump was telling nearly 40 lies a day in his final year in office. And while fact-checkers stopped tabulating after he left office, that number has surely only skyrocketed as Trump has spent the last two years repeating lies about the 2020 election ad nauseum.

Give Trump a mic, a stage, and a large audience, and he will use the platform to do nothing but spread more lies. And likely with little pushback or fact-checking from the moderator. Just ask CNN.

Why would Biden give him that opportunity?

Political pundits and the media will scoff at the idea of Biden' skipping debates, but there is little evidence it will hurt him with the voters who matter the most in 2024.

The truth of the matter is the election will be decided by a tiny portion of the population—slightly more than fit in your average college football stadium—that live in just five states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. And this tiny slice of the population—and the electorate—are the very people least likely to watch a presidential debate.

So, while pundits will howl about this breach of precedent, the voters who will likely decide the election are likely to not notice or care.

Presidential debates live in political folklore. For political junkies, they are the Super Bowl. Historians will tell you about the importance of the first-ever televised debate in 1960, when a young and vibrant Sen. John F. Kennedy contrasted with an older-looking and sweaty Vice President Richard Nixon; or 1976 when incumbent President Gerald Ford said there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, which created an opening for a young governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, to make a name for himself; and of Ronald Reagan famously asking in 1980, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

But this is not 1960, 1976, or 1980. It is simply a rerun of a movie we have all seen before—the 2020 election.

For the first time in history, we have an incumbent president facing off against his immediate predecessor. Neither man, nor where they stand on the issues, is unknown to voters. A debate is not going to reveal some great unknown quality in two men who have occupied the White House as either vice president or president for the last 15 years straight.

Trump has broken every so-called "rule' and "norm" in politics for the last eight years. And the idea that Biden should run a traditional campaign—including doing things like debating Trump—a twice-impeached, four-time-indicted former president running to lead the very government he tried to violently overthrow—is absurd and, more importantly, a losing strategy.

Would the public benefit from a substantive debate on the issues? Of course. But that is not what you get with Trump. A debate with Trump would instantly devolve into a theater of the absurd in which everyone but Trump loses.

As the famous saying goes, never wrestle with pigs—you both get dirty, and the pig likes it. The 2024 election version of that is don't hand the mic to a pathological liar. All you get is a flood of lies, but the liar likes it.

Trump may view debates with Biden as the key to his victory, but the key to Biden's victory may be denying him that opportunity.

Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on X/Twitter at @dgordon52.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.