A big clue to how Biden and Trump will do tonight: their performances in past debates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/a-big-clue-to-how-biden-and-trump-will-do-tonight-their-performances-in-past-debates.html

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What’s the best way to get a hint of how President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. might approach their debate tonight? Review their past debates.

We reviewed Mr. Trump’s three debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential debates, in 2008 and 2012, and a sampling of his Democratic primary debates in 2019 and 2020. Here are some things we found:

President Trump is a tough and effective debater. He is unconventional and norm-breaking in many ways (starting with saying things that are false) but quite conventional in others. He had a series of clear messages in 2016: Mrs. Clinton had been in Washington for too long. Democrats supported job-killing trade deals. Obamacare was “a disaster.”

He will offer similar assessments about Mr. Biden for viewers tonight. One big difference: Mr. Trump is an incumbent. It’s going to be harder for him to run as the outsider. He presumably will have to defend his record on issues like the pandemic.

As Mrs. Clinton learned, with Mr. Trump the hits keep coming; they are often exaggerated or false, and he moves so fast it’s often difficult to keep up with them, much less correct them.

Mr. Biden had his ups and downs as a debater. His best performance was his last one, in March. At that point, there were just two people left in the race for the Democratic nomination — Mr. Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Mr. Biden was aggressive and focused with Mr. Sanders, unlike in some of his earlier performances, pressing him, for example, on his support for Medicare for all. He deftly turned back attacks with a smile and a laugh.

In the more crowded Democratic debates early on in the campaign, it was easy to tell why so many Democrats — and Mr. Trump — said that Mr. Biden had lost a step. That was not the case with only two people onstage. But there were issues Mr. Biden struggled with, and they are likely to come up tonight, too: His support for NAFTA and for the war in Iraq.