A Full Guide to the Presidential Town Halls Tonight
Politics

A Full Information to the Presidential City Halls Tonight

By Nancy Carrillo

  • President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. will perform in separate, nationally televised town hall events starting Thursday at 8 p.m. East.

  • Mr Trump will answer questions from voters in Miami. NBC, MSNBC and CNBC broadcast City Hall hosted by Today presenter Savannah Guthrie. It is expected to take about an hour.

  • ABC will host the Biden City Hall, held at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and hosted by George Stephanopoulos, the main anchor of ABC News. The event is expected to last 90 minutes.

  • Mr Trump and Mr Biden were originally supposed to have a debate on Thursday night, but it was canceled after the president said goodbye because it was supposed to be virtual.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania filed a Trump campaign lawsuit last week seeking to limit the collection and counting of postal ballot papers. Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday they would restrict or simply block the distribution of a report in the New York Post making unsubstantiated claims about Mr Biden. The stimulus bill that Mr. Trump is pushing contradicts both parties on Capitol Hill.

In less than three weeks, Mr Trump has a number of goals to point out to explain why things are not going his way. Where he is focused, his anger will also preview how he will react to the results on election night if he loses.

The candidates won’t share a stage, but their rival town halls, held on the same night at the same time on different networks, could build a dynamic similar to the first general election debate this month.

With a considerable lead on national and battlefield polls, Mr. Biden is only hoping that time will run out without outside events altering the trajectory of the race. Mr. Trump, who has filled his schedule with as many rallies as possible, tries to drown him out with noise.

Will Mr. Trump try to overshadow Mr. Biden with his outbursts and attacks that have exhausted even some of his own followers?

The day before the events at City Hall, Republicans picked up the report in the New York Post about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, which was so unfounded that Twitter and Facebook took the extraordinary step of restricting access to their platforms.

The report, spearheaded by Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, referred to Hunter Biden’s work at a Ukrainian energy company and whether he had sought his father’s help – the source of the President’s ongoing unfounded smear against the Biden. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the former Vice President, but Mr Trump was eager to create distractions to keep voters from focusing on his mistakes in dealing with the coronavirus.

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Despite the many questions surrounding the report – and the president’s own story in which he was influential in office – Mr Trump seems to feel a political opportunity and attacks Mr Biden over the report at a rally in Iowa on Wednesday.

If he ignores questions from voters at City Hall and blends the conversation on cutting back the conversation, Mr Trump risks inviting political backlash among indecisive voters that Hunter Biden is not a problem for in times of national crisis. And it would raise the question of whether Mr Trump is using more obvious information of dubious origins to improve his electoral chances than he did four years ago when he publicly asked Russia to find emails from Hillary Clinton’s servers.

Mr. Trump is running out of time to change the direction of the race. That is why Mr Biden has an important commandment in his town hall: do not make any unforced mistakes.

For months, Mr Trump has made unsubstantiated claims about Mr Biden’s perseverance and mental acuity, and the Trump campaign has sought to capitalize on Mr Biden’s verbal missteps. Mr Trump’s repeated warnings about Mr Biden’s fitness resulted in lowering expectations of the former Vice President in the initial debate.

Mr. Biden may have cleared the bar by staying upright and convincing for the duration of the matchup, but Mr. Trump continues to push for the message that his rival has refused. At his rally on Wednesday, he said Mr Biden was “shot” and “lost it”.

Updated

Oct. 14, 2020 at 11:31 am ET

Mr. Biden lives from personal conversations with the voters, so the town hall offers him a better format than a traditional debate. But Mr Trump and his allies are sure to cling to any notable misstep by the Democratic candidate, especially any moment that can serve as evidence that Mr Biden has lost a step.

So much of the 2020 campaign has revolved around Mr Trump, and many people are highly motivated to vote in the November election out of a burning desire to deny him a second term.

But whether they will also be enthusiastic about Mr. Biden is another question.

In the initial debate, Mr Trump’s relentless interruptions were not an ideal setting for Mr Biden to articulate his own vision for the country.

City hall will give him another opportunity to vote for a Biden presidency. It’s also another opportunity to reach out to voters who may not like Mr Trump but were initially not attracted to Mr Biden’s candidacy, including many young voters who favored other Democrats in the primary race.

Mr Biden is not lacking in subjects to talk about in the town hall. He has set a far-reaching and ambitious political agenda, with plans to expand health insurance, fight climate change, reduce the racial prosperity gap, and revitalize the economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. However, it remains to be seen whether he will succeed in setting up these plans concisely and convincingly in the town hall.

Mr Biden and his fellow campaigner, Senator Kamala Harris, had to grapple with a number of tricky political issues to appeal to both progressive and moderate voters.

One example is the future of the Supreme Court. Amid calls by some Democrats to add seats to the court as a countermeasure if the Senate confirms Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mr Biden has repeatedly asked himself whether he supports the expansion of the court.

Over and over again, Mr. Biden refused to offer a position, saying it was a distraction. But he said in a local television interview on Monday that he was “not a fan of court packaging”. This answer is unlikely to put an end to the questions on the subject.

Other politically sensitive issues are issues such as taxes, the Green New Deal and fracking or fracking. Mr Trump has attempted to portray Mr Biden as an instrument of the far left of the Democratic Party, despite the former Vice President’s reputation as moderate. Mr Biden was faced with the task of keeping his party together while at the same time keeping his distance from certain proposals that might paint him as far to the left as possible.

Katie Glueck contributed to the coverage.

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