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Your comment is highly voted, but attacking a strawman argument that doesn't truly exist. Everyone, and I mean almost literally everyone, including here, knows that debates are only important for two things. Media reactions, including maybe a few clips, and the narrative it sometimes establishes; and the impact on swing voters. That's it! That's the whole list! And swing voters are well known to decide things on vibes and gut feelings and impressions. Also not new news.
Partisan or pre-decided viewers, who we all know are not the target audience, have different feelings. That's what will show up in a number of formats, because they are the people writing many of these opinions, and virtually everyone likes to hear themselves talk.
We are in the latter category almost all of us, the ones who want to talk. We are discussing the debate because it is fun. At least on some level! And virtually everyone in this thread agrees about the fundamental points about what actual swing voters probably thought. So I'm not too impressed by a rant against people who basically don't exist, and don't understand the hostility against "motte-rats", because I was under the impression that we all know how much of a bubble this place is, and use it as some form of entertainment or vague intellectual hobbyism? Or are you not aware of this?
That argument is a strawman, the real argument is [the same argument].
There are plenty of posters in this thread arguing that Biden might have looked old, but he still won because blarglemumkas. Likewise, I watched the debate with (conservative) friends who said things like, "That argument doesn't work on me, but I bet it plays great with normies!" These are all rationalizations. I want to remove the word "normie" from our vocabulary. I want to stop analyzing how some hypothetical person who doesn't exist might have reasoned. (To the extent that "normies" exist, they reason in a million idiosyncratic and personal ways.)
My position is that this substance is style, that these political facts-and-figures arguments are not real, that discussing these things are an empty trap. It doesn't matter what Biden (or Trump) said as much as how he said it: the substance is style, the style is the real substance. I think much of the discussion here is focused on the wrong half of the debate. I think it's masturbatory. And I'm not impressed by the argument that, of course it's jerking off, that's what we're here for.
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