Wednesday, Oct. 19 will be the last general election debate of the campaign season, falling 19 days before the election. For both candidates, it’s a high-stakes contest. Can Donald Trump turn out a good enough performance to bring himself back into the margin of error? Can Hillary Clinton maintain her position ahead of her opponent and strengthen her lead? Either could falter, maintain or come out strong. Arguably, Clinton managed the third option in the first. Inarguably, Trump stumbled into the first option in that same debate. In the second, both of them maintained their positions — it was largely unremarkable for both of them.
Clinton cannot afford to lose this debate, and it would be underachieving if she shot for merely maintaining her position. She has the chance to win big, and she should try for that. To win, she needs to make a strong case for herself. Trump’s scandals and failings are low-hanging fruit, but ultimately not what we need to hear from her. We have heard that for the entire general election. What we need to hear is not “don’t vote for Trump” but “here’s why you should vote for Clinton.” Her policy knowledge is often wonkish to a level that excludes laymen — she needs to express her positions simply, knowledgeably, and tell us why she is competent, qualified, and ready to serve the country.
More to the point, she can’t spend the whole night attacking him. Trump can get away with kicking an opponent when he’s down — as we saw in the primaries with his relentless needling of Jeb Bush — but if she wants to stay on top, she can’t get down in the mud with him. One of her worst moments in the last debate, other than her tortured defense of her leaked Wall Street speeches, was the moment where she reminded him that “Republicans are leaving you.” Not only did this turn out to be mostly wrong outside of established Republican politicians, with his poll numbers only dropping slightly after the release of the tapes on Oct. 8, but it sounded like she was talking down to him, reinforcing the image of smug elitism that she is already struggling with.
Although it’s galling to watch her have to pretend this is a normal campaign against a normal opponent, that’s what she has to do. No one can beat Trump in the gutter — he will always be better at slinging insults and snapping out one-liners. Trying to beat him at his own game is part of what killed Marco Rubio. Clinton — more than most people — does not have the raw charisma to pull off a knock-down drag-out personal war with Trump and should not try. Her strong points are policy knowledge and smooth delivery — she should lean on that rather than trying to arm-wrestle him for who has the worse personality. Attacking hypocrisies and holes in his policies would be smarter than trying to turn out the best one-liner.
As for Trump, the standards are low enough that the bar for him to maintain his position is currently underground. (Although, as we saw in the first debate, he is prepared to tunnel through bedrock to squeeze under that bar.) If he simply refrains from having a rage aneurysm onstage, he’ll probably maintain his position. But Trump is running behind, so he can’t afford to just keep putting along where he is. He needs to overtake her. And to do that, he needs to start practicing. Last week’s debate showed us that he can manage to keep his temper for almost a whole hour and a half — this week, we need to see that he can cogently express his positions and refrain from whining about how everything is unfair.
Unfortunately for him, Trump is almost laughably bad at both cogence and not whining. And that is how he could lose. Moderator Chris Wallaceis a tough questioner, and Trump is famously terrible at hard questions. Sometimes he even manages to miss softballs if he’s riled up, and he’s coming into this debate hot off a bad, bad two weeks that will probably predispose him to losing his temper. If he comes out ranting and raving like he did in the first debate, he’ll lose. If he blathers his way through non-policies and makes it clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’ll lose. It’s unlikely that either of those things will dissuade his supporters, but they won’t reach outside that safe percentage of Americans who are already die-hard Trump supporters, either, and that’s what you have to do when you’re losing—expand your support.
Trump needs to know his policies. He needs to understand them and be able to defend them against at least the standard range of attacks. He needs to have a good answer for the accusations leveled against him — even if they are all false, crying that it’s a media hit job won’t be a satisfying answer — and a better defense for his 2005 remarks than “locker room talk.” Ideally, having a better answer than “that’s smart” to the accusation of paying no taxes would be wise. These are all doable things, but Trump is unlikely to bother to try. He didn’t prepare well enough for the first debate, he didn’t prepare well enough for the second debate, and there’s no reason to think he will prepare any better for the third.
We’ll see what happens. It could be as relatively insignificant as the second debate or as much of a catastrophe as the first. Either way, it promises to be a uniquely painful experience for tired, disgusted voters.