Once Upon a Hill’s guide to the first presidential debate
From each campaign’s strategy to an interesting media subplot, here’s the best of my reporter’s notebook to plug you into everything you need to know about tonight’s Biden-Trump face-off.

Atlanta is the center of the American political universe tonight as President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are less than two hours away from facing off in the first presidential debate of the general election cycle.
The setting is no accident: Georgia helped secure Trump’s first term in 2016, flipped blue four years later to power Biden to victory and delivered Biden the state’s two Senate seats a few months later—along with a majority that teamed up with House Democrats to enact historic legislation. Both campaigns are under no illusion that whoever wins the Peach State will likely secure a second term.
If you’d like to tune in tonight, there are several ways to watch the event. CNN, which is hosting the debate at its studios, will air it on its cable and streaming platforms. The discussion will also be simulcast on CBS News, ABC News, Fox News, NewsNation, PBS, C-SPAN, MSNBC and NBC.
And if you’re looking to catch up on all the storylines you need to know ahead of showtime, you’re in luck: I’ve emptied my notebook to bring you up to speed and make room to capture even more reporting and analysis from the live event.
The basics: CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the debate, which will last 90 minutes with two three-and-a-half-minute commercial breaks.
The candidates won’t give a closing statement and there will be no audience. The candidates’ microphones will only be hot when it’s their turn to speak.
The Biden campaign won the coin toss ahead of the debate and requested the podium on the right side of the stage. As a result, Trump will give the final closing statement.
Both campaigns agreed to these terms, a detail to remember if you see Trump allies alleging the debate is rigged.
The view from Biden world: Before arriving in Atlanta this afternoon, Biden has been at the presidential retreat Camp David with a clear public schedule since last Thursday, surrounded by a small group of close aides and advisors to prepare for the debate.
Senior campaign officials said the president would frame Trump as the architect of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, three days after the second anniversary of the landmark Dobbs decision that eliminated the national right to abortion care—a ruling the former president said he’s proud of. Biden will also paint his opponent as an ongoing threat to democracy who would incite more chaos, division and violence if he regains power. The president will also characterize Trump as the preferred candidate among billionaires and big corporations whose second term would pave the way for more tax cuts for his well-off buddies at the expense of investments in affordable housing, Social Security and Medicare.
The campaign invested enormous resources to give Biden a head start on drawing this contrast.
It launched a seven-figure multimedia ad buy that includes digital takeovers across eight news sites—Buzzfeed, USA Today, CNN, El Tiempo Latino, Telemundo, theGrio, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—featuring ads about how dangerous a second Trump term would be.
Team Biden also projected a QR code on local billboards, sidewalks and buildings that voters can scan to learn more about Project 2025, the blueprint conservative activists and former Trump administration officials have crafted for his second term to institutionalize his vision for the nation.
Campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz described the major ad buy as a show of force that illustrates the contrast between Biden, who they say is fighting for everyday Americans, and Trump, who is only in it for himself.
It also touted an endorsement from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a veteran and former member of the nine-member January 6th Committee that unanimously voted to refer Trump to the Justice Department for prosecution in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“My entire life has been guided by the conviction that America is a beacon of freedom, liberty, and democracy,” Kinzinger said. “So while I certainly don’t agree with President Biden on everything—and I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for president—I know that he will always protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy.”
The Kinzinger stamp of approval is significant because he’s the prototypical anti-Trump Republican whose support the Biden campaign hopes to attract this fall.
“Those Americans have a home in President Biden’s coalition, and our campaign knows that we need to show up and earn their support,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “President Biden will always fight for American democracy, for the rule of law, treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, and working to find common ground—even when we don’t agree with each other on everything.”
The view from Trump world: The former president will traffic in his bombastic brand of grievance politics and attack Biden on immigration, cooling-but-chronic inflation, perceived high rates of crime and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—while likely claiming credit for Biden’s legislative achievements.
The campaign dispatched Reps. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Wesley Hunt (R-Texas)—two of its most visible Black surrogates—to host a roundtable at an Atlanta barbershop to connect with Black men disaffected with Biden.
Trump didn’t attend the event in person but called into it and reprised his racist assumption that his felony convictions will help him with Black voters, a topic I wrote about for COURIER a couple of weeks ago.
“The Black support has gone through the roof, and I guess I equate it to problems they’ve had,” Trump said. “Since it happened, the support among the Black community and the Hispanic community has skyrocketed.”
Biden campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement that Trump thinks so little of voters of color that he believes his convictions will win him over despite spending his entire life and career harming Black and Latino communities.
“This might come as news to Trump, but Black and Latino voters want nothing to do with his racist stereotypes and they know better than to buy into his lazy, shameful attempts at ‘outreach,’” Chitika added. “Nothing, from Trump’s mugshot to his bootleg sneakers, will make voters forget his racist track record in the White House and throughout his life.”
Jeffries told reporters that Republicans have had every opportunity since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to demonstrate a willingness to meet the needs of communities of color, including Black ones and consistently failed.
“This eleventh-hour attempt, which is not anchored in any reality, and Donald Trump had four years in office to make a difference with respect to the economic fortunes and well-being of the African American community and failed to do it when Republicans had complete control of government,” he said. “Why would anyone reasonably believe that if Donald Trump had complete control of the House and the Senate but failed to act in any meaningful way to transform the economic fortunes of everyday Americans, generally, and the Black and Latino community specifically, that it would happen now?”
The view from the House Democrats: Jeffries said his members will hold several watch parties, including one by the Congressional Black Caucus that he plans to stop by this evening.
He told reporters he hadn’t spoken to Biden before the debate but encouraged the president to be himself.
“His life experiences are those shared by ordinary everyday Americans. He’s experienced family pain. He’s persevered through it and he remains in the arena because he cares about making life better for the American people,” Jeffries said. “President Biden has an incredible track record of doing just that and solving problems for hardworking American families—and most importantly, has a compelling vision moving forward to grow the middle class, end price gouging and lower costs for the American people, while at the same time restoring reproductive freedom for the women of America and defending democracy.”
I spent the week discussing the debate in more than a dozen conversations with House Democrats who represent a cross-section of the coalitions Biden will need to turn out in November to maintain American democracy as we know it. Read what they told me in my latest COURIER column.
The numbers: A new New York Times/Sienna poll found that Trump is leading by three points among likely voters and six points among registered voters nationally in a head-to-head matchup against Biden.
Polling averages collected by the NYT and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight show Trump with a narrower one-point lead in a head-to-head matchup. The lead grows to two with independent candidate and potential Biden spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the mix.
If Trump won every swing state where he leads, he would receive enough electoral votes to win. But Biden is within range in those states and has steadily narrowed his polling gap since he delivered his State of the Union address in March.
The normal caveats apply: Polls reflect a snapshot in time and don’t always match the final results.
According to a new Gallup poll, less than half of Americans view either candidate favorably, think either has the personality and leadership qualities to be president and say they agree with either on the issues that are most important to them.
But Gretchen Whitmer or Wes Moore aren’t walking through that door. Either Biden or Trump will be your next president. Team Biden’s strategy is to make this a choice between the alternative, not the almighty, as the president likes to say.
Trump, on the other hand, thinks you have nothing else to lose by giving him another shot. What’s that saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…well, you know the rest.
Make me smarter. Did I miss something in this post? Is there something else I should know? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch.
How we got here: The Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonprofit organization that sponsored all general election presidential debates between 1988 and 2020, initially scheduled four debates between mid-September and early October.
But both campaigns disliked the CPD’s debate format and schedule and ultimately bypassed it altogether to plan their own debates.
The debate came together in a matter of hours with Biden announcing on X, the social app formerly known as Twitter that he’d debate the former president twice and Trump accepting on his Truth Social platform.
Biden then announced he received an invitation from CNN to attend their debate, followed by Trump almost immediately. (Trump has since called for more debates, but the Biden camp is sticking to two for now.)
Flashback: The two candidates debated each other for the first time in September 2020.
Biden was ahead in the polls then and the pandemic was still raging. debate was originally scheduled to be held at Notre Dame in Indiana, but the university withdrew as a host site during the summer of 2020 due to concerns about the pandemic.
Trump reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 before the debate, a claim which he denied. (Trump was hospitalized for the virus six days after the debate.)
Two weeks before the debate, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Trump would nominate Amy Coney Barrett, then a circuit judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Ginsburg on the day of her funeral. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quickly moved Barrett’s nomination through the chamber before Election Day, drawing condemnation from Democrats for refusing to consider Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia died.
Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden during the debate, leading to Biden’s viral remark: “Will you shut up, man?” (The chaotic nature of the debate contributed to the Biden camp ditching the CPD.)
This debate was also the backdrop of Trump’s infamous “Stand back and stand by” remark to the white nationalist group Proud Boys when Wallace asked him to condemn white supremacy.
The debate was the third-watched debate in US history with over 73 million TV viewers, behind the first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the only debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980.
The media angle: An interesting subplot emerged yesterday when I obtained a statement from Rep. Gregory Meeks, a senior House Democrat from New York and the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus’s campaign arm, who called out CNN for failing to credential Black-owned media for the debate. Meeks also encouraged the network to allow at least 10 outlets to cover the event.
“CNN’s exclusion of Black-owned media represents an egregious oversight and is totally unacceptable,” he said in the statement. “Black-owned media provides a critical, trusted source of information to our communities and their role in our democracy must be respected and honored by CNN.”
April Ryan, White House Bureau Chief at TheGrio and longest-serving Black White House correspondent in American history, reported this afternoon that her outlet was credentialed for the debate but declined to instead invest its resources into its own coverage.
Jeffries told me this afternoon he was deeply troubled that Black media outlets, which he said represent a diverse and important part of America, were mostly excluded.
“We need to figure out what happened, why it happened, and most importantly, make sure that it never happens again,” he said. “The stakes are very high in connection with this presidential debate and presidential election, and it’s unfortunate that some of the outlets that a significant portion of the American people rely upon to have their news received will not be on the front lines of covering the events of this evening.”
It turns out it’s not just Black media outlets who are pissed.
The White House Correspondents’ Association blasted the network for refusing to include the pool of reporters who travel with the president inside the studio for the debate.
While CNN provided a TV feed and access for photographers, WCHA President and NBC News White House Correspondent Kelly O’Donnell argued in a statement that the presence of a pool reporter is essential to provide context, insight and independent observation and emphasized the pool reporter’s role is separate from the debate’s production.
“WHCA believes this principle of coverage matters,” O’Donnell added. “The White House travel pool has been included in past presidential debates and we believe that standard of access is essential. Precedent matters for future debates.”
Looking ahead: President Biden and Dr. Biden will drop by a campaign watch party after the debate before traveling to North Carolina for a rally. Vice President Kamala Harris will go to Nevada to mobilize and speak to Latino voters.
Trump will head to Virginia to campaign with Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, in their first public appearance together. (The former president lost the state twice in 2016 and 2020, but recent polls show him tied with Biden.)
You can also expect an army of surrogates from both campaigns to appear on every network that will have them to capitalize on any bright moments from the debate—and spin any lowlights in their favor. And finally, gird your iMessage app and email inbox for a flurry of fundraising emails because what would modern politics be without a post-event money grab?