Good evening. It's debate week!
The showdown in Atlanta means election season is here, but with less excitement (more on that below). And thatReaders, this news means that On Politics will be arriving in your inbox weekday evenings while my colleagues and I try to make sense of this strange and momentous election. Jess Bidgood
I asked you how you all felt about the debate, and I read all of your responses.
Laurie Rowe is a Florida Democrat and newsletter reader (hi, Laurie!) She's making plans for Thursday's presidential debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, and she has a Plan B if things go wrong.
“I and all my Democratic friends plan to watch, but are terrified that Biden will show up with a 'one shot.' To lighten the mood, we've got Biden-Trump bingo cards ready,” Rowe wrote to me. “If that doesn't work, bingo might turn into a drinking game.”
Last week, I asked you how you felt about the first debate of the 2024 general election. I read over 600 of your responses. And as I wrote today, I learned that many of you were deeply distressed by the debate. It was more like “noooo” than “woo-hoo.”
Some of you were so excited you were sure we would see a strong performance from the president. But many of you, like Rowe and his friends, were hopeful Biden would do well but worried he would flop. Some of you were downright despairing of seeing Trump on the debate stage again. Many of you were completely sick of both men and wondering if you should just stop watching altogether.
“I saw this and I thought this was it,” Kyle Smith, a Democrat from Northville, Michigan, told me when I called yesterday afternoon. “This?”
“It's like watching a car crash,” wrote Nancy Davis, an independent from Pennsylvania. “You can't look away.”
The presidential debates are usually greeted with feverish anticipation, a moment when people on both sides of the political divide come together in a battle for the future of the country. So the depth of anxiety this year is unusual, especially among Biden supporters. And yet, on a night as riddled with unpredictability as this one, it's fitting.
But those low expectations could be a boon, Democratic strategists say.
“Every time the president goes out he exceeds expectations, and every time the president goes out he reassures Democrats,” pollster Celinda Lake, who is working with Biden's reelection campaign but speaking only for her own opinion, told me. “But we have the power to worry again and again.”
Unstable matchup
Trump doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to presidential debates. In 2016, he dominated Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in a showdown that was perceived by many viewers as extremely sexist. In his first debate with Biden in 2020, Trump's frequent interruptions while Biden was speaking were widely seen as damaging. He ended up losing that election.
But Biden's history of debate success has not allayed the anxiety of his supporters, especially as Republicans go to great lengths, including deceptively editing the video, to stoke doubts about his fitness to run because of his age.
“It scares me because it reminds me of the Kennedy-Nixon debates,” said Alma Ramos McDermott, a Florida Democrat, acknowledging that Trump and Biden are much closer in age than John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were at the time of their 1960 debates.
Still, she worried, “Biden will look pale and quiet next to Trump's loudmouth.”
Democratic strategists like Lake say Biden was smart to push for an early debate, both to reassure voters like Ramos McDermott that he still has potential, and to remind Trump himself to voters who may have forgotten how unpredictable and abrasive he can be.
“God willing, Trump will be at his best,” Lake said with a wry smile.
The sounds of excitement… silence
At Trump's rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, my colleague Simon Levin spoke with several supporters who were confident their candidate would win, though one of them also offered some advice.
“Trump needs to stay calm and not get too excited,” said Brooke Christie, a 44-year-old cancer researcher.
Trump himself, concerned that he may have set the bar too low by constantly mocking his opponents' cognitive abilities, has acted to raise expectations for Biden: At the Philadelphia rally, Trump mocked Biden's debate preparations, but in so doing acknowledged that his opponent does, in fact, study.
“It's like dying,” Trump said. “It could be the most boring thing to do, or it could be the most exciting thing to do. Who knows?”
Are you excited? Many of the readers who wrote to me to say they were excited noted one thing in particular: the fact that the moderator will turn off the microphones of candidates who are not scheduled to speak.
“It's going to be interesting to turn off the microphone,” said Kurt Vogel, a former Republican from Buckhead, Georgia, who is now an independent.
And Michigan Democrat Ava Reynolds wrote that she found one thing to be happy about as the election got one step closer to being over.
What to read today
How a decades-old Republican nonprofit became Michael Flynn's money machine
Three years ago, former General Michael Flynn, a former Trump aide and right-wing icon, took over a small nonprofit. Soon, the organization was paying Flynn and his family more than $500,000 a year. My colleagues David FahrenholdSurveying nonprofits Alexandra BarzonInvestigating right-wing movements I recently wrote about the lucrative side of Flynn's celebrity.I asked Alexandra to tell me more about the little-known group funding Flynn, a group that has long been a voice for right-wing trends.
Seventy-five years ago, a group of businessmen worried that Communism was taking over the country founded a small charity called America's Future. They warned that American schools were churning out only “sideburned, duck-tailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slackers” who the Communists could easily defeat.
Since then, the group has undergone multiple transformations, joining various popular right-wing movements of the time.
As Phyllis Schlafly, a well-known right-wing anti-feminist activist, gained influence in the 1970s, the group's materials began calling for an overhaul of school curricula to ensure that children were taught traditional gender roles. By the 1990s, one of Schlafly's employees was syndicating conservative essays along with limericks to radio stations. For a time, the group went quiet.
The organization was a blank slate at the time, but had a track record and assets when it was taken over by Ed Martin, a former state Republican chairman with ties to Schlafly. Martin did not respond to our attempts to contact him, but he has since become Flynn's main promoter and supporter.
Martin soon handed the organization over to Flynn, filling the board with key figures who have helped popularize QAnon and related movements, and embracing the next phase of far-right conspiracy theories: the false idea that there is a shadowy cabal of high-ranking officials involved in child exploitation and human trafficking.
The group holds training sessions around the country, and I recently attended one in rural Ohio, but as soon as I introduced myself to Flynn and said I was a reporter, I was asked to leave.