Home Stretch: Are the First 60 Minutes of Tonight's Debate the Most Important Hour of the 2020 Campaign?

That headline may read like an overwrought hot take, but bear with me. The 2020 election has been packed with wild news cycles and massive, 'game-changer' level events -- ranging from everything related to the global pandemic, to the massive resulting economic fallout, to racial tensions and dramatic social unrest, to a hugely consequential Supreme Court vacancy. That list merely scratches the surface, ignoring myriad all-consuming media tempests like Bob Woodward's book and Trump's tax returns, as well as more typical high-profile political events such as the major party conventions. It has been, in many respects, an extraordinary year. Yet against that backdrop of chaos and tumult, the story of this election has been remarkable consistency

Look at the data. On January 1st, at the start of the new year, Biden led by 5.7 percentage points nationally in the RCP average. After the first week of April, several weeks into the pandemic crisis, Biden led by 6.1 percentage points. By the start of the summer, Biden's lead was 6.8 percentage points. The day after the Democratic and Republican conventions concluded back-to-back weeks of primetime programming in late August, Biden's lead was 6.9 percentage points. And yesterday, more than a week into the SCOTUS firestorm, Biden's advantage was 6.9 percentage points. For the entire calendar year, Biden's national edge has floated between four and ten percentage points, usually within a band of five to seven points. Events that could have upended the contest have not; the split between the incumbent and his challenger has remained stubbornly constant, as if the swirl of outside factors do not exist. The simplest explanation for this is that Joe Biden is running as a generic Democrat, doing everything he can -- including not doing much of anything at all -- to make this race as close to a pure referendum on President Trump as possible. And, so far, it appears to be working.

That's why I've raised that question in my headline. If nothing else has disrupted the trajectory of this race, Joe Biden conceivably has an opportunity to come close to closing the deal tonight. The bar is very low. All he needs to do is perform...fine for 90 minutes (or even less, if people start to tune out after an hour or so) in the first head-to-head debate, which I strongly suspect will be the most-watched, and holds the strongest potential to move the needle. Nothing is over until voters make their choices, but I think Allahpundit is right that tonight's event looms large.