Chuck Todd: A whole new campaign

Six weeks ago, it seemed fairly clear the country was uninterested in the Biden-Trump rematch. Even the ratings for the first debate, consequential though it was, were shockingly low. At 51 million viewers, it was the lowest-rated first general election debate for a presidential race since we started tracking TV viewership for these things.

Polling also indicated lower interest in this campaign and an extreme distaste for the choices the two major parties were offering. North of 50% of voters were regularly saying they’d like to see anyone other than these two run for president.

In short, voters were telling us in all sorts of ways that this matchup was one they didn’t want and they weren’t going to tune in to — until, perhaps, the last possible minute. After all, these two candidates, as far as voters were concerned, were well-defined. What new information would voters think they needed? One of the reasons I believe the initial post-debate polls didn’t shift much is that the public got the two candidates they expected: a slightly manic fact-free former President Donald Trump versus a barely ambulatory President Joe Biden.

To paraphrase the late, great football coach Dennis Green, yelling from a post-game podium, “They were who we thought they were.”

Well, there’s a reason we political reporters like to utter the cliché that sometimes a month (or a week) is a lifetime in politics. Because right now, we’re in the midst of experiencing a second or a third lifetime politically, just since that June 27 debate.

We are now going from a presidential campaign that left the public disinterested and at times disgusted it to a campaign that I could see generating an electorate that might be as interested, if not more so, as in 2008