THE HILL -- The primary goal Trump and Biden must achieve isn’t to win, debate historians and experts said. It’s to not lose.
“What you want to do is you want to hold your base, so you try not to lose, basically. You try to avoid the big gaffe, the misstatement,” said Joseph Tuman, a political communications expert at San Francisco State University.
“... What [Trump] has done, in many ways, is lower expectations for voters, who are now watching these debates looking to see if Biden is going to confirm Mr. Trump’s characterization of him,” Tuman said. “All Biden has to do in this first debate is sound like a guy with a pulse and someone who can do subject-verb-object in sentence construction and he’ll get over the low bar Trump has set for him.”