The first presidential debate ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was held Tuesday, September 29, as President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden met onstage in Cleveland, Ohio.
Trump and Biden, clashed in a contentious, chaotic presidential election debate trying for 90 minutes to convince American voters that the other one was unfit to lead the United States for the next four years.
They argued over the world-leading coronavirus death toll of 205,000 in the U.S., the integrity and honesty of the November 3 vote, Trump’s nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, fractured racial relations in the U.S., environmental policies and more.
Mostly they insulted each other with cutting barbs, name-calling and personal attacks.
The debate came five weeks ahead of the election. It was the first of three times the two candidates will meet face to face to debate during the next month.
At Tuesday’s encounter, the two candidates frequently interrupted each other, although the debate moderator, Fox News journalist Chris Wallace, more than an hour into the face-off rebuked Trump for not following the debate rules to allow each candidate to finish his answers unimpeded.
Early voting has started in some U.S. states and millions of people have requested or been sent absentee ballots, so they do not have to face other people at polling stations across the country on Election Day in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The high-stakes debate, perhaps watched on television or livestreamed by 100 million Americans, comes as Biden has for weeks maintained about a 7-percentage-point advantage over Trump in national polls, threatening to make Trump the third U.S. president in the past four decades to lose reelection for a second four-year term in the White House.
However, the race is closer in several key battleground states, which raises the possibility that Trump could once again lose the popular vote — as he did against Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and still win more of the all-important state electors to claim
