BU Today: So what kind of evening are we going to have on Thursday?

Lauren Mattioli: Both Biden and Trump, but especially Trump, are used to playing to a live audience. That’s where he shines. That’s his favored format, and so if there isn’t a live audience and he’s forced to engage with Biden and the moderators, the grownups in the room, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a change in how he answers questions, the sorts of claims he’s willing to make.

I think the Biden camp thinks, we just have to let Trump be Trump and he’ll say something or many things that are upsetting or shocking or he’ll put his foot in his mouth. And I wonder if without the live audience he’s going to be as prone to do that, because I think a lot of the time when he’s going for the shock factor, playing to that audience, that’s where we see a lot of his provocations.

Andrew David: I assume the reason why the Trump team agreed to this was that they believe Trump has a strong possibility of pulling out a good debate in a Biden-friendly environment. And that in a situation like that, you have this group of undecided voters, maybe people who normally would vote Republican but for one issue. For instance, one of the groups that voted against Trump in 2020 was suburban women. Maybe they’re on the fence because of abortion, but they see Trump do a good debate, that turns them around. [Trump’s team] thinks that this is a risk worth taking.

For Biden, I think this is a genuine opportunity for him to point to a number of things that are actually going quite well. I mean, the economy is good [although] people don’t believe that necessarily. He could say, these are reasons why your life is actually better now than it was four years ago. One of the key questions in American politics is crime. Crime is down, the economy is up, and people think it’s the opposite. And this is what Biden has to struggle against.

BU Today: What about the age issue?

Mattioli: The biggest criticism of Biden is that he’s too old. He’s going to be 86 at the end of his term if he wins. And so he’s going to be kind of doing what he did in the March State of the Union speech, I think, which is trying to appear as vigorous and active and spry as possible. Because he needs to overcome this idea that he’s doddering, that he’s not sharp enough to be president.

David: One of the critiques of Joe Biden is that he’s not going to be able to stand through the whole thing and answer a straight question. I think if he is able to basically do what he’s done many times before, that will be judged by many people a success. And it may even change some minds. “Oh, this guy that I’ve been told is not not able to string two sentences together, he did a good job.” Trump, by contrast, is almost up against the same thing. I think people are expecting him to go on and really spar. But if he pushes that too much, if the memes and the one liners that come out seem excessively cruel to this undecided group, or somehow not relating to reality, that’s going to impact him.

BU Today: How do you think Biden will handle Trump’s 34 felony convictions in the New York hush money case?

David: Trump essentially has to explain it away. And I think for many of his supporters, that’s not a very high bar to clear: “The system’s rigged. I was going to be convicted no matter what. You don’t have to worry about this. Because it’s all nothing.”

For Biden, with the conviction of his son recently, there is a fair argument that he actually has a stronger foot to stand on in terms of the justice system cutting both ways. “I know this, as a parent. These charges were not brought maliciously by the federal government. They’re brought by the district attorney in New York, these convictions matter. And that’s why you should pay attention to them.”

There’s probably a line where Biden has to be careful about overemphasizing this, the idea of felon Trump. I’m not sure that’s going to work with a large part of the audience. But it’s the idea that if you really do care about the law, and you care about the ramifications of this, you need to take this into account. Biden could successfully argue that, and it fits right into that idea of a sound-bite moment: you don’t need a million words to kind of get to where he wants his audience to be with that.

Mattioli: I think every time Biden talks about Donald Trump in the third person, he needs to say convicted felon Donald Trump. Convicted felon Donald Trump did this. And there’s enough quantitative weight on that in people’s minds where even if—I don’t know who’s in the middle of the road about Donald Trump at this point, but if they are—people really aren’t middle of the road about the idea of a convicted felon. I don’t know what Biden’s team will tell him about how much he needs to focus on that, particularly, but also the point of the debates is to do [what is usually the work of the conventions]—to get the faithful fired up.

BU Today: How much do debates matter anymore?

Mattioli: The idea that we often have and my students [have when they] talk about debates is people go in undecided, they watch the debate, and the debate helps them make a decision. And debates, we know from social science that they just don’t function that way. The people who watch debates are not undecided. The people who watch debates are cheerleaders. It’s like fans who show up to football games, to the Super Bowl—these people are already committed. Nobody is going to be convinced of anything. Policy-wise, no one’s going to change their vote. It just doesn’t happen. Because the people who watch are the people who have already made up their minds.