Friday, August 2, 2019

Democratic debate debacle

The second round of Democratic debates has ended, leaving pundits to wonder what's wrong.
If you boil all the prognostication down to a single sentence, it would yield the answer to your question: Nothing has changed. Joe Biden is still shakily in the lead for the nomination, and no single candidate is yet poised to knock him off. In the end, perhaps the most salient fact to be taken away from the debates is the collapse in viewership: 8.7 million viewers tuned in the first night (second-night figures are not yet available as I write this), as opposed to 15.3 million viewers for the first Democratic debate a month ago and 18.1 million for the second. We’re down to the hard-core, highly engaged base of Democratic voters who probably are the least in need of the debates to make up their minds, plus Trump campaign strategists and scattered hate-watchers from the other side.
Or maybe it's bad candidates with bad ideas.

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