ATLANTA — President Joe Biden was supposed to put the nation’s mind at ease over his physical and mental capacity with his debate showing Thursday night.
But from the onset of the debate, Biden, 81, seemingly struggled even to talk, mostly summoning a weak, raspy voice. In the opening minutes, he repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.
In one of the most notable moments, Biden ended a rambling statement that lacked focus by saying, “We finally beat Medicare,” before moderators cut him off and transitioned back to former President Donald Trump.
While Biden warmed up and gained more of a rhythm as the debate progressed, he struggled to land a punch against Trump, much less fact-check everything Trump said as he unleashed a torrent of bad information.
Trump also pounced on Biden, saying at one point that he didn’t understand what Biden had just said with regard to the border.
“I don’t know if he knows what he said, either,” Trump said.
Nearly an hour into the debate, a Biden aide and others familiar with his situation offered up an explanation for his hoarseness: He has a cold.
But there were problems aside from the shakiness of Biden’s voice. When he wasn’t talking, he often stared off into the distance. Trump frequently steamrolled over Biden, accusing him of being a criminal and of peddling misinformation — many times without a response from Biden, though he did fire back with a handful of one-liners throughout.
The Biden campaign acknowledged that the debate would be a critical moment in the election, with officials hoping it could shake up the race to his benefit. Most polls have found the race to be neck and neck, with razor-thin margins that have moved negligibly for months, even after a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts.
Instead of a new beginning, many Democrats saw it as a moment for panic.
“Democrats just committed collective suicide,” said a party strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “Biden sounds hoarse, looks tired and is babbling. He is reaffirming everything voters already perceived. President Biden can’t win. This debate is a nail in the political coffin.”
“It’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t nominate someone else,” a Democratic consultant who works on down-ballot races said.
Biden did ramp up as the debate progressed.
“Only one of us is a convicted felon, and I’m looking at him,” Biden said to Trump. That was one moment that tested particularly well in the Biden campaign’s internal real-time polling at the time of the debate, according to a person familiar with the polling.
An aide said that it was “not an ideal start” for Biden at the beginning of the debate but that there was “no mass panic” at the campaign headquarters in Delaware.
The muting of the candidates’ microphones at the debate, a stipulation both campaigns agreed to before the debate, added a new dimension to the faceoff. The first Biden-Trump match-up in 2020 was marked by repeated interruptions by Trump, leading to moments of frustration for Biden.
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden complained at that first Cleveland debate.
Reaction pours in
“I’m thinking the Democrats are thinking about who the Barry Goldwater is who can walk in tomorrow and tell the president he needs to step aside,” said Ben Proto, chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party.
In 1974, after key Watergate tapes were made public, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., went to see President Richard Nixon alongside other prominent lawmakers, telling Nixon that he would be convicted by the Senate and that he should step aside — which he did.
Biden’s campaign defended his performance, saying he offered a “positive and winning vision” for America.
“On the other side of the stage was Donald Trump, who offered a dark and backwards window into what America will look like if he steps foot back in the White House: a country where women are forced to beg for the health care they need to stay alive. A country that puts the interests of billionaires over working people,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “And a former president who not once, not twice, but three times, failed to promise he would accept the results of a free and fair election this November.”
Some Democrats also defended Biden presidency more broadly after the debate, pointing to his policies over Trump’s.
“One thing this debate won’t change is Trump’s base instinct to sell out anyone to make a quick buck or put his own image on a steak, golf course or even the Holy Bible,” said Brandon Weathersby, a spokesman with the pro-Biden American Bridge 21st Century super PAC. “Trump puts himself first every time, and that won’t change if he becomes president again.”
Trump, meanwhile, has fended off his own questions over whether he’s diminished by age, including his struggles to stay on topic and his meandering when he’s speaking. Biden has posited that Trump “snapped” after his 2020 election loss and is unstable, which he aired again Thursday night.
Trump often gave his typical rambling responses and seemed at times to make up factoids and figures.
“During my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually,” Trump said.
Trump also said he would lower insulin prices for seniors, but it was Biden who signed legislation in 2022 that lowered out-of-pocket costs for people on Medicare to $35 a month and covered all insulin products.
Setting the stage for the fall
The first debate during the 2020 election cycle was in early September, meaning the first 2024 general election debate was significantly earlier than usual — more than two months ahead of Labor Day, which is often seen as the point when most voters start to pay attention to presidential contests.
“Debates move numbers,” said Matt Gorman, a longtime Republican strategist who worked for presidential campaign of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. “And with this so early — and the next one not until September — you’re stuck with the narrative for four long months.
“And one and the other’s performance will set the tone for the next one,” he added.
For months, Trump’s team has been hammering Biden’s mental acuity, a strategy that is at odds with how campaigns generally handle the lead-up to debates, when they try to build up opponents as deft debaters to set expectations.
The expectations for Biden were low, and by almost all estimates he was unable to clear them.
“Biden just had to beat himself; unfortunately the stumbling and diminished Joe Biden the world has come to know made Trump look competent and energetic,” said a former Trump campaign official who isn’t working for his campaign this year. “I expect there will be some loud calls from Democrats for a change on the top of the ticket.”
“The floor for Biden was so low,” the person added. “After Biden’s debate performance, it seems the floor is 6 feet under.”
The 90-minute debate hit on a wide variety of topics, but many of the most dominant themes were centered on those that have been most prominent on the campaign trail over the past few months.
Trump hit Biden on two big policy fights that have stubbornly dogged his campaign: immigration and inflation.
Since Biden took office, 15 million jobs have been created and the unemployment rate sits at a relatively low 4%, but prices for consumer goods have remained high, and they provided a consistent line of attack from the Trump campaign and Republicans more broadly.
In one heated exchange, Trump point-blank said “he caused the inflation.” Biden said in response there was less inflation under Trump because he tanked the economy.
“There was no inflation when I came into office,” Biden said before that rejoinder — a quote Republicans quickly used as evidence that all of the current price hikes happened on Biden’s watch.
Trump continued to attack Biden over his border policies, which his campaign has used as one of its biggest lines of attack throughout the campaign. That often including amplifying each time an undocumented migrant commits a crime even though the data doesn’t support the idea of a migrant crime wave.
“We have a border that is the most dangerous place anywhere in the world,” Trump said.
Earlier this year, Trump used his influence over congressional Republicans to block a bipartisan border deal that Biden supported.
Biden also tried to land a punch about Jan. 6, trying to build on the oft-discussed idea that Trump’s returning to the White House would be a threat to democracy.
“He encouraged those folks to go up to Capitol Hill,” Biden said. “He sat there for three hours being begged by his vice president and many colleagues on the Republican side to do something.”
Trump deflected, arguing the Biden should be “ashamed” for arresting those who participated in the attempted insurrection.
Both of the main candidates in British Columbia‘s election campaign pushed their own plans to solve parts of the housing crisis.
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad told a news conference in Surrey that his government would end the multi-year permit delays and would get homes built at the speed and scale needed to address the housing crisis.
NDP Leader David Eby went to Cumberland on Vancouver Island to promote his party’s plan to fast-track factory-built homes.
Eby said pre-built homes would cut waste, reduce emissions, and advances in the industry mean the homes are “beautiful and high-quality.”
He said the process was “more like Lego” than normal construction.
“The idea is pretty straightforward. In a controlled factory environment, you can build faster, you can build with less waste and the homes that are built are more consistent and more efficient and it’s cheaper.”
Rustad said the Conservative Party of B.C. would redesign the approval process for home building, setting a six-month limit for rezoning and development permit and three months for a building permit.
“This means that we will significantly be able to improve the time frame it takes to actually get construction happening in this province, and we’ll be working with city halls across the province to be able to meet these timelines,” Rustad said.
If a clear yes or no isn’t issued by a city within that limit, the province would issue the permit, said a B.C. Conservative news release announcing the platform.
Rustad said the party would remove NDP taxes on housing, support transit-oriented communities, reform development cost charges and make taxes fair for homeowners.
“We have so much regulation that has been put in place associated with housing that it makes it really difficult for anybody to be able to actually get through and build things, not to mention the cost,” he said. “So we’ll amend the Local Government Act to prevent any home killing red tape that has been introduced by this government.”
The party’s statement also outlined their zoning plan, adding that it would work with BC Assessment “to make sure that current homeowners don’t get hit with higher tax bills based on future potential.”
The party statement said, if elected, a Conservative government would build new towns, saying B.C. is blessed with an abundance of land, but the NDP refuses to use it to end the housing shortage.
“We will identify land outside the Agricultural Land Reserve that has the potential to support beautiful new communities.”
A statement issued by the NDP on Friday said it would work with industry, municipalities and First Nations to create a provincewide framework for prefabricated homes so builders know what’s required in every community.
It said there would be a pre-approved set of designs to reduce the permitting process, and it would work to develop skills training needed to support prefabricated home construction.
The statement said Scandinavian countries had embraced factory-built homes, which “offer an alternative to the much slower, more costly process of building on-site.”
“By growing B.C.’s own factory-built home construction industry, everyone from multi-generational families to municipalities will be able to quickly build single homes, duplexes and triplexes on land they already own,” Eby said.
The party said legislation passed by the NDP government last year was a “game changer” for the factory-built home construction industry in the province, where there are currently 10 certified manufacturing plants.
Muchalat Construction Ltd. is one of them, and owner Tania Formosa said pre-approved structures speed up the building process considerably.
She said her company’s projects currently take 12 to 13 months to complete, from startup design to getting the house on site.
“If everything was in place and fast-tracked at the beginning and we were able to just fly along, it would probably take three months off the full schedule,” she said.
She said a main issue for modular manufacturers is that work gets stalled if they run into roadblocks with jurisdictions or BC Housing in the approval process.
“There’s no option for the manufacturer to start another project,” she said. “Having our products approved prior to the process would be amazing.”
She acknowledged the potential drawback of pre-approved designs creating a cookie-cutter look for some neighbourhoods.
“Unfortunately (what) happens in your jurisdiction, in your city, is it ends up looking a lot the same, but what are your priorities?”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 27, 2024.
British Columbians could find out who wins the provincial election on Oct. 19 in about the same time it took to start counting ballots in previous votes.
Andrew Watson, a spokesman for Elections BC, says new electronic vote tabulators mean officials hope to have half of the preliminary results for election night reported within about 30 minutes, and to be substantially complete within an hour of polls closing.
Watson says in previous general elections — where votes have been counted manually — they didn’t start the tallies until about 45 minutes after polls closed.
This will B.C.’s first general election using electronic tabulators after the system was tested in byelections in 2022 and 2023, and Watson says the changes will make the process both faster and more accessible.
Voters still mark their candidate on a paper ballot that will then be fed into the electronic counter, while networked laptops will be used to look up peoples’ names and cross them off the voters list.
One voting location in each riding will also offer various accessible voting methods for the first time, where residents will be able to listen to an audio recording of the candidates and make their selection using either large paddles or by blowing into or sucking on a straw.
The province’s three main party leaders are campaigning across B.C. today with NDP Leader David Eby in Chilliwack promising to double apprenticeships for skilled trades, Conservative Leader John Rustad in Prince George talking power generation, and Greens Leader Sonia Furstenau holding an announcement Thursday about mental health.
It comes as a health-care advocacy group wants to know where British Columbia politicians stand on six key issues ahead of an election it says will decide the future of public health in the province.
The BC Health Coalition wants improved care for seniors, universal access to essential medicine, better access to primary care, reduced surgery wait times, and sustainable working conditions for health-care workers.
It also wants pledges to protect funding for public health care, asking candidates to phase out contracts to profit-driven corporate providers that it says are draining funds from public services.
Ayendri Riddell, the coalition’s director of policy and campaigns, said in a statement that British Columbians need to know if parties will commit to solutions “beyond the political slogans” in campaigning for the Oct. 19 election.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.
In Canadian parliamentary democracy, a vote of no confidence (also known as a confidence motion) is a crucial mechanism that can force a sitting government to resign or call an election. It is typically initiated when the opposition, or even members of the ruling party, believe that the government has lost the support of the majority in the House of Commons.
What Is a Vote of No Confidence?
A vote of no confidence is essentially a test of whether the government, led by the prime minister, still commands the support of the majority of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. If the government loses such a vote, it is either required to resign or request the dissolution of Parliament, leading to a general election.
This process upholds one of the fundamental principles of Canadian democracy: the government must maintain the confidence of the elected House of Commons to govern. This rule ensures accountability and provides a check on the government’s power.
How Many Votes Are Needed for a No Confidence Motion?
In the Canadian House of Commons, there are 338 seats. To pass a vote of no confidence, a simple majority of MPs must vote in favor of the motion. This means that at least 170 MPs must vote in support of the motion to cause the government to lose confidence.
If the government holds a minority of seats, it is more vulnerable to such a vote. In this case, the opposition parties could band together to reach the 170 votes required for the no-confidence motion to succeed. In a majority government, the ruling party has more than half the seats, making it more difficult for a vote of no confidence to pass, unless there is significant dissent within the ruling party itself.
Types of Confidence Votes
Explicit Confidence Motions: These are motions specifically introduced to test whether the government still holds the confidence of the House. For example, the opposition might move a motion stating, “That this House has no confidence in the government.”
Implicit Confidence Motions: Some votes are automatically considered confidence motions, even if they are not explicitly labeled as such. The most common example is the approval of the federal budget. If a government loses a vote on its budget, it is seen as losing the confidence of the House.
Key Legislation: Occasionally, the government may declare certain pieces of legislation as confidence matters. This could be done to ensure the support of the ruling party and its allies, as a loss on such a bill would mean the collapse of the government.
What Happens If the Government Loses a Confidence Vote?
If a government loses a confidence vote in the House of Commons, two outcomes are possible:
Resignation and New Government Formation: The prime minister may resign, and the governor general can invite another leader, typically the leader of the opposition, to try to form a new government that can command the confidence of the House.
Dissolution of Parliament and General Election: The prime minister can request that the governor general dissolve Parliament, triggering a general election. This gives voters the opportunity to elect a new Parliament and government.
Historical Context of Confidence Votes in Canada
Canada has seen several instances of votes of no confidence, particularly during minority government situations. For example, in 2011, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper lost a vote of confidence over contempt of Parliament, which led to the dissolution of Parliament and the federal election.
Historically, most no-confidence votes are associated with budgetary issues or key pieces of legislation. They can be rare, especially in majority governments, as the ruling party usually has enough support to avoid defeat in the House of Commons.
To pass a vote of no confidence in Canada, at least 170 MPs out of 338 must vote in favor of the motion. This vote can lead to the government’s resignation or a general election, making it a powerful tool in ensuring that the government remains accountable to the elected representatives of the people. In the context of Canadian democracy, the vote of no confidence is a key safeguard of parliamentary oversight and political responsibility.
