Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half hour. He wasn’t scoring well at all. But it’s not as though they walked out,” she said. “They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”
But the fallout was devastating. If the campaign’s goal was to turn the race into more of a choice between Trump and Biden rather than simply a referendum on the president, it backfired.
Still, even in the ensuing weeks, Dunn thought Biden could hold on.
She had seen him at his political low point in the 2020 campaign — after he had lost the first three primary contests and looked like he was toast — and had helped him turn things around in South Carolina. In Biden world, the press, pundits and politicians always underestimated him.