There’s one word that best describes Democrats’ reaction to President Joe Biden’s performance in Thursday’s debate: panic. His faltering appearance alongside former President Donald Trump has been enough to prompt calls for his swift exit from the race in favor of another candidate. It wasn’t ideal, to put it mildly — but looking back at recent history, Biden’s poor showing was hardly unprecedented.
It wasn’t ideal, to put it mildly — but looking back at recent history, Biden’s poor showing was hardly unprecedented.
As the incumbent, the one who’s fighting to keep the job, most sitting presidents are inherently on the defensive. It’s their records over the last four years that are in the spotlight, and they are the ones making pitches to have another chance to maintain the status quo. Challengers, on the other hand, get to go on the offensive from the jump, putting their opponents on the back foot. Biden had hoped to break that trend, as NBC News reported before the debate — which clearly didn’t go according to plan.
Meanwhile, it feels absurd to consider Trump as the change candidate in this race, given that the candidates’ roles were reversed just four years ago, with him in office and Biden the one offering a return to normalcy. But Trump has benefited from the strange form of public amnesia that the intervening period has engendered, as the immediacy of Biden’s administration is foremost in voters’ minds over the chaos of his. This may be part of the reason Biden’s attempts to call out his predecessor’s record fell flat Thursday, though his scattershot delivery certainly didn’t help.
Biden and his aides can take cold comfort in the fact that his former boss, President Barack Obama, didn’t fare much better during his first debate outing as an incumbent. Obama tanked hard during his first debate against GOP nominee Mitt Romney, coming across as hyper-aloof and professorial, more focused on wonking out over his record than on contrasting himself with the challenger. Romney, on the other hand, had toned down his “severe conservative” persona from the primaries and came across as more affable compared to the stern and lecturing Obama.
The last two Republican incumbents faced their own difficulties when they took the debate stage. As I noted last week, Trump was a hot mess during his September 2020 showdown with Biden, seeming to spend as much time fighting with the moderator as actually engaging with the former vice president. Former President George W. Bush didn’t flame out spectacularly in 2004 against Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. But Kerry was said to have won the debate by a 2-to-1 ratio among viewers, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
Biden’s camp could also look to President Ronald Reagan’s trainwreck debate in 1984. Reagan, then the oldest sitting president in history, had been faring much better in the polls than his rival, Democrat Walter Mondale, throughout the campaign. But when the two of them faced off in their first debate, Reagan was woefully unprepared and rambling and occasionally appeared confused onstage. The performance set off a flurry of questions about whether he was too old to hold the presidency and triggered a 7-point drop in the polls.
It was deeply ironic, considering how severely Reagan had trounced Democratic President Jimmy Carter four years earlier. Carter had refused to take part in the earlier of the two planned debates, as it would have included Rep. John Anderson, R-Ill., who was running as an independent. The decision left Carter only one chance to defend himself and his administration with only a week before Election Day. The chance evaporated when Reagan delivered his now-iconic closing statement, asking Americans to consider “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush, didn’t fare much better than Carter, despite having more bites at the apple. He shared the stage in October 1992 with Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton and eccentric billionaire Ross Perot, whose third-party candidacy was pulling a rare amount of attention and support. And while Bush had no major flubs, a CNN/USA Today poll conducted over the next few days found that only 16% of respondents thought the incumbent was the winner. (Notably, it was in the second debate, the first to use the now-familiar town hall format, where Clinton really shone — and Bush famously was caught on camera checking his watch). It’s worth remembering that Reagan, Bush, and even Trump also managed to make adjustments and hold their own much better in subsequent debates. Clinton was the rare exception to this trend in the first 1996 debate against former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan. The incumbent easily handled his challenger, offering up a defense of his record while still managing to land attacks of his own against the former Senate GOP leader. It definitely helped that Dole refused to focus on the “character issues” that the president would spend the next several years combatting. Even that performance from Clinton “was not his finest moment by any stretch of the imagination,” Alan Schroeder, a presidential debate historian, told NBC News. It still left Clinton in a good position to offer advice to the shaken Obama camp after the train wreck against Romney in 2012. “No one’s ever won the second debate by winning the first,” Clinton said at a fundraiser between the two debates, former aide Jon Favreau later recounted. It was clear that his team listened, delivering a pair of follow-up performances that helped enable Obama’s landslide electoral victory in November. It’s worth remembering that Reagan, Bush and even Trump also managed to make adjustments and hold their own much better in subsequent debates. Unlike his predecessors, Biden has a lot longer to recover from the missteps of last week. The next debate between the two candidates is months away instead of the usual weeks (or even days), which one imagines would be plenty of time to course-correct if it’s a matter of preparedness at issue. It’s going to be up to his team this summer to draw what lessons it can from history in hopes of tacking more toward Reagan, who managed to turn his age from a point of weakness into an all-timer laugh line, and away from Carter when Biden and Trump meet again this September.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
