After the last 4 years??? This was not a road to Damascus moment, and not the first time.
Not being snarky but do you think there is a fence sitting minority out there (which has to be an endangered species) that made up their mind during this debate and the proud boy statement?
Yeah, “stand down and stand by” WTF. Trump needs to be called out on what exactly he meant by that statement much more than he was during the debate.
Apparently “stand back and stand by” which is worse.
He has been trying to bring minorities over his side; some of them could have got stuck on the fence.
I guess what it boils down to is that a lot of people are content with their candidate just being good enough. I’m not. I want him to be a rock star who will stomp a new hole in Trump’s ass.
Biden has a lifetime in “polite” politics. He still, to this day, is all in on bipartisanship and making friends with republicans.
He is not suited to this style of debate and if the mods let Trump go freewheeling as he often does then Biden is very ill-suited to respond well.
And I’m sure his concession speech will be very polite.
“Stand back and stand by.” As in stand by for further instructions. 
I thought Biden’s attacks were mostly fine. No giant zingers, but I thought they mostly landed and will stick around as clips in ads and such. But that wasn’t his focus, because that’s not his strength. He did okay.
He’s not suited to be president with this mentality. The idea that once Trump is gone and Republicans will go back to being good people and we’ll all be shaking hands and caring about America against is fucking absurd. He was right there in the Obama administration when the Republicans launched their full blown 8 year campaign of insanity against it. If Biden somehow thinks the people across from the aisle are reasonable people that he can work with again, he is completely incapable of being president in 2020.
As has been pointed out this is less about changing votes (not likely to happen) and more about motivating the base to go vote.
In that analysis I think Trump “won” the debate.
Wow, that was about as painful as I thought it would be. So much extended sessions of talking over each other, precipitated by Trump but I can see why Biden didn’t want to back down. Trump arguing with the moderator was ridiculous. Neither one of them could hardly answer a question without attacking the other and saying what the other one did or didn’t do. Biden started getting better about actually answering questions, when he could string a coherent sentence together. Biden wins in civility, they were about equally coherent, and Biden wins in my interpretation of what answers he was actually trying to convey.
His campaign is doing okay. Significantly better than Hillary, according to the polls. I’m not sure what you expect from him. This is Joe Biden we’re talking about, not Obama or Bill Clinton or some other amazing political talent. He did about as well as he’s capable of, and the polling suggests that’s more than good enough as of now.
No matter how aggravated you lot were at Biden, he wound up being the winner. I checked Fox first thing and they went straight to the heart of the matter: Biden said nothing wrong, no gaffes, no mistakes, nothing they could pull out and make him look bad for the next two weeks. They admitted that they didn’t think any votes were changed.
Never forget that the important audience are the people who decide what the news will say. Fox couldn’t land a glove a him. Yeah, they’ll come up with something when they have time to decide on their talking points, but Biden stood up to a barrage of vomit and got off clean. That’s huge.
Yeah, there’s usually one “town hall” style of debate, which Biden would probably do better at (not that I think he did bad tonight) but with the pandemic, don’t know if one of those is planned. Suppose I could look it up but don’t feel like it right now.
Remember folks, it was widely considered Romney beat Obama in the first debate of 2012. Obama the best speaker of my time but no one is perfect…
Agreed but that is what we got:
It is. The next presidential debate, on Oct. 15, will be a town hall style debate.
With any luck for humanity, the third debate will be called off.
Seriously, I bet he’s glad he isn’t moderating the other two.
Worthless pundit chatter. And three of those are from August, eons ago.
Do not, I repeat, do NOT pay attention to space-filling thumbsuckers. They exist for other writers, not for real people.