Debate Style

Political analysis post. No sides taken, just analysis. Topic: debate style.

Hillary will be the usual. I don't expect she'll do anything out of the ordinary. She'll have the usual set of one liners and a phrase she repeats a lot. Standard stuff we've seen a dozen times before.

Trump has basically two approaches, which makes him more interesting to discuss: he can choose to go the typical politician route and try and appear more traditionally presidential OR he can double down on the bombast, slamming and insulting and never stopping.

In the past, when he's had this choice, he has always chosen the latter. Despite it being low on content or substance, this has had no small amount of success for him. It got him the nomination and he's coming into this debate with Hillary's formerly double digit leads in multiple swing states now barely there at all. At the same time, there are limits to how far you can get on bravado alone. He needs to put more substance out there and being churlish doesn't do that.

Another factor: pretty much no matter what he says, he will be depicted as a bad guy. Any challenge to Hillary will be label misogynist (regardless of whether it actually is). If he goes a calmer route, he'll still be labeled a mad man by the press at large. The gains from it are therefore minimal. It's probably why he's chosen to adopt such an over the top persona to begin with. It's a question of how much of that we'll see.

So, does he try and increase his voter pool by doing a face turn to appear more palatable or does he own the role of the heel to keep the energy and momentum going? It'll be an interesting choice.