It’s not the courtroom, it’s the debate stage: Biden and Trump’s race really starts now

After months of relatively cautious campaigning, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are done playing it safe.

The debates that the two major-party candidates agreed to this week reflect an effort by both contenders to take control of the 2024 campaign, after weeks of intense focus on Trump’s trials, protest votes and, increasingly, the threat that they both could lose votes to a third-party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But by putting two bouts on the books, Trump and Biden will have an opening to reshape the contest. The first debate will take place weeks before the mid-July Republican National Convention. And with Kennedy unlikely to qualify for at least the first televised bout, the debates will allow Biden and Trump to reframe the race in viewers’ minds as a strictly head-to-head contest.

“If you’re the Biden campaign or the Trump campaign, you’re looking to make this about the other person,” said Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. “There are third-party candidates who all want to jump up and get on the stage and be a part of this conversation and this move shuts them out.”

And by doing so, Herman said, “it automatically highlights and forces the binary choice between the two candidates.”

The timing of the first debate, on June 27 on CNN, is unprecedentedly early. And it could hardly come at a better time for both Trump and Biden.

Trump’s campaign has largely been confined to a Manhattan courthouse for weeks, though he has held events on the weekends and when the trial is out of session. His grip over his party’s base is showing cracks with each successive GOP primary, in which swathes of voters are still picking former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley two months after she exited the race.

Biden may be in even greater need of the jolt a solid debate performance could provide. He trails in the polls in key battleground states. And he has faced mounting discontent from within the Democratic Party over his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, with protest votes in early Democratic primaries followed by pro-Palestinian demonstrations that roiled college campuses.

Meanwhile, Trump and Biden have been forced to confront a rising threat in Kennedy, who recent polls show could siphon votes from both major-party candidates.

Trump’s trials and the conflict in the Middle East are almost certain to feature in any debate. But unlike at Trump’s hush-money trial in New York — where he is forced to sit quietly for hours — or at college demonstrations where protesters are the main act, Trump and Biden will be able to command the stage.

The debate-qualifying criteria that CNN put forward will likely exclude Kennedy by requiring candidates to be on the ballot in enough states to earn a majority of Electoral College votes by June 20. ABC, which is hosting the second Trump-Biden debate on Sept 10, issued similar criteria.

Beyond — and perhaps more importantly than — potentially sidelining Kennedy, the debates will serve as a showcase for Biden and Trump to shake up a race that’s seen next to no polling movement for months.

Yet the televised bouts, with likely enormous — though remote — audiences, pose risks for both candidates. Biden is gaffe-prone. Trump has trouble controlling his temper. Neither is considered a master debater.

“The risk for Trump is for him not to have a debate like he had in 2020” in his first debate against Biden, where he infamously talked over both the Democrat and the moderator, said Brett O’Donnell, a veteran Republican debate coach.

“If I was prepping Trump, I’d say: “‘Keep your demeanor calm and let [Biden] make those mistakes and fact check him on things like inflation,’” O’Donnell said.

Both candidates appear to have calculated the potential reward is greater than the risk. Skipping debates would fuel already-persistent public doubts about Biden’s fitness for the nation’s top job. The incumbent is already narrowly lagging Trump in surveys of several key swing states.

Appearing onstage so soon — the CNN debate would be the earliest general-election debate in the history of television — also offers Biden a long runway in which his campaign could course correct in the event of any on-air missteps.

“If you’re behind, you have to do something to change the dynamic,” said Neil Oxman, a longtime Pennsylvania Democratic strategist. “[The Biden campaign] spent tens of millions of dollars in the late summer and fall on ‘Bidenomics’ ads and it didn’t move the needle a point. Is the money they’re spending now moving the needle? It does not seem like it is.”

At some point, Oxman said, “you have to take the gamble of getting on stage with [Trump] and hope he goes insane.”