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Nearly half of likely voters expect President Joe Biden to make a series of embarrassing blurbs when he faces Donald Trump in their first debate this month. About 49 percent think he will forget where he is and 41 percent said they expect him to walk on the wrong side of the stage, according to a new poll from JL Partners.
Another 40 percent think he will have trouble standing up during the CNN debate in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 27. Voters, on the other hand, expect a dominant performance from his Republican rival, and overwhelmingly expect him to emerge victorious.
About 79 percent expect Trump to interrupt Biden and 54 percent think his microphone will be turned off at some point. Pollster James Johnson said the numbers were terrible for Biden.
“They show voters’ deep concerns about his ability to govern,” he said. “However, there may be a win for Biden in the medium term because Trump has clearly set expectations for Biden very low in the debate. “If Biden pulls through and doesn’t have a major accident, that will be a victory for the president.
The two candidates will face each other on the debate stage later this month and then again in September. To test the public’s expectations, JL Partners asked 500 likely voters for their opinions on June 10 and 11.
Half said they expected Trump to win, while only 39 percent said they expected Biden to win. Nearly three-quarters said they thought Biden, who has battled stuttering his entire life, would twist his words at some point. The results are a reminder of Biden’s recent bumbling performances, which have provided ample ammunition to the army of Trump meme makers.
However, both candidates are getting older — Biden is 81 and Trump turns 78 on Friday — and tend to speak in winding sentences that end suddenly or are filled with non-sequiturs. Trump offered his own, less scientific assessment in a typically freewheeling appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last month. And he acknowledged that Biden could benefit from low expectations and a soft media lens.
“If this horrible person ends the debate, which I think he will… if he stands, if he stands, they will say it was a brilliant performance,” Trump said, before imagining the reviews. ‘It was a brilliant performance. They’ve never seen anything like this…reminiscent of the days of FDR.”
FDR, he said, had a “beautiful patrician voice, wonderful voice, wonderful debater.” The poll also found that 61 percent of voters expect Trump to tell an incoherent story. But in his NRA speech, Trump claimed the wordy stories had been carefully conveyed.
“You know there is genius in what I do,” he said, interrupting a meandering story about President Macron of France, which may or may not have had anything to do with tariffs and included a brief interlude in honor of the name ‘Emmanuel’ and an attack on CNN. ‘You know I go from here to there, and it all comes back in a beautiful picture. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
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