Charles Lipson

America has a peculiar — indeed, unique — way of deciding national elections. Instead of a cumulative national vote, the president and vice president are determined by fifty separate state elections. The top ticket in each state (except Nebraska and Maine) receives all that state’s electoral votes, no matter how slim the margin of victory. Each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of House members plus its senators. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.  What if, in this razor-thin election, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris fall one vote short? Fortunately, that’s only a remote possibility, but it’s not impossible. It all depends on how some six or seven closely divided “swing states” split between the two candidates.

This Tuesday’s debate is the most consequential moment of the “second” campaign, just as Trump’s debate with Biden was the most consequential of the “first” campaign. Biden’s self-immolation ultimately forced his withdrawal. His withdrawal sets the stage for the current debate, and not just because it produced a new Democratic candidate. It produced her so quickly, with so little discussion or opposition, that Kamala Harris was not forced to persuade the party’s progressive voter base. A “primary” campaign would have damaged Harris, and the powers behind the Democratic throne, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, saved her from it. How would it have hurt her?

This is one very strange presidential campaign.  That’s not just because it seems to go on forever. This one seemed to begin shortly after Eisenhower left office. It’s also because there have been two general election campaigns in a row. The first pitted Donald Trump against Joe Biden and ended with Trump’s decisive victory. The clincher was Biden’s humiliating debate performance, which showed the world what his aides, his party and a compliant media had been hiding: the president was suffering serious cognitive decline.  Once voters had peeked behind the curtain, they were convinced Biden could not serve another four years. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was competent to serve now. That question still hovers, unanswered, over the White House.

If you felt the ground shaking, it was Democrats jumping for joy after dumping Joe Biden and settling on a new, more energetic replacement. Joe was the old clunker. Kamala has that new car smell. The switcheroo raises three fundamental questions for the election. First: how long will Harris’s novelty last? Answer: until Labor Day, but probably not longer. Second: how does Harris deal with the Biden administration’s policy failures? Answer: by emphasizing a hopeful future with few details and avoiding talking about her role in the administration’s mistakes. Third: how does Harris deal with her record of very progressive positions, on tape from her last presidential run?

On Thursday, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed to debate September 10 on ABC. That’s good news for voters. They deserve to see and hear the two candidates contest the issues and explain their differences, unfiltered. The differences are dramatic. They need to be fleshed out, and they need pushback from the other side. In fact, voters deserve more than a single debate. They deserve two or three so the issues can be explored in depth, away from scripted speeches, advertising spin, and biased media coverage. The debates will be more valuable if they follow the model set by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who moderated the face-off in Atlanta between Trump and Joe Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The best way to understand Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance for vice president is to ask how different choices would have helped with different problems. That Trump didn’t choose them tells us that Trump isn’t worried about those problems. He has different goals. If Donald Trump was deeply worried about winning swing states, he probably would have selected Glenn Youngkin. The popular Virginia governor would probably give him the most help with independents in those states. If Trump were worried about Evangelicals, he wouldn’t have passed over Doug Burgum because of his strong stance on early-term abortions.

The Democrats are not just caught between one dog and one hydrant. They are caught between three — and the water is coming down hard on their legs.  The first dog, obviously, is the president’s physical and mental condition and his status as the presumptive nominee who won near-unanimous support in the primaries and secured enough votes to win the nomination on the first ballot. Those victories leave Biden alone in charge of staying in the race. Others can pressure him, offer him carrots and sticks, but Biden and his family control the decision.  The second dog is Biden’s nearly impossible battle to recover public trust after his disastrous debate against Donald Trump. Voters simply don’t buy the White House explanation that it was “one bad night.

Joe Biden didn’t make any major mistakes in his Friday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. That’s the best you can say. He helped himself only because, after a dreadful week, he didn’t hurt himself. No hits, no runs, no errors.  Stephanopoulos concentrated almost entirely on two topics: Biden’s health and his dreadful poll numbers, which threaten not only Democratic control of the White House but also their chance to control the House or Senate. The best characterization of down-ballot Democrats today is “hair on fire.” Joe Biden’s interview didn’t douse the flames.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.  “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”  Those were Hemingway’s words in 1926's The Sun Also Rises.   A century later, they apply to Joe Biden, not financially but politically. For him, the sun is not rising. It’s setting.   “Gradually and then suddenly” is the story of Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline. “Gradually and then suddenly” is how his army of enablers in the media, the Democratic Party and the donor base abandoned his defense.

After Thursday’s fiasco in Atlanta, Joe Biden faces two hard choices. The hardest — and grimmest — is whether to stay in the race. Staying in means ignoring the rising chorus of calls to withdraw, not from the opposing party but from flaks on his own side, led by the New York Times. The only groups that haven’t issued that call, so far, are his party’s leadership on Capitol Hill and the two former Democratic presidents. They see the same problems everyone else does, but they probably think it is too late to force Joe out without catastrophic costs — and may be impossible because Joe simply won’t leave.  Second, if Joe does stay in the race, his campaign strategy has to change.

Following Biden’s horrific debate performance, the Democrats have an enormous problem, best captured in the name of a recent TV series: Schitt’s Creek. Paddles for sale! Democrats should max out their credit cards buying them. Every sentient Democrat should be in full-scale panic. It’s not that Trump’s debate performance was all that great. It wasn’t. Everything people think about him, for better or worse, was on full display. The problem, obviously, was Biden’s performance. It’s less that Trump won and more that Biden lost — badly — not just the debate but potentially his ability to stay in the race. Come on, man. Our president is in rough shape, cognitively and physically, and his party can’t hide it. Everyone who watched the debacle could see it.