Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Biden Aced the Town Hall. Why Didn't Trump?

Taking questions from voters is a basic skill for politicians. The president still hasn’t mastered it.

September 18, 2020 at 7:40 AM EDT

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Good enough.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty

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Donald Trump is lucky that presidential elections aren’t decided by televised town-hall meetings. If they were, after his effort on ABC on Tuesday and Joe Biden’s on CNN Thursday, Trump would be lucky to clear 100 electoral votes. It’s not that Biden was all that great — he was fine, but nothing special. It’s that Trump was that bad, and in ways that made his opponent look even better.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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