Analysis: For Trump, Biden and CNN, Thursday’s debate is about the future, not the past

When Joe Biden and Donald Trump return to the debate arena Thursday night for the first time in 43 months, they will be greeted by a wary American electorate hungry for answers. Not about the past, but for the future.

Voters want near-term solutions for what they see ailing the country right now: inflation, crime, energy poverty and a border so insecure for terrorists and foreign malicious actors to exploit that even a panicked FBI sees blinking red.

They want to stop the needless bloodshed that erased young and promising lives like those of 22-year-old Laken Riley in Georgia or 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas at the hands of murderous and unlawful migrants.

They want to be assured they won’t have to choose in the future between groceries for the kitchen table or gas for the car, or be forced to lower the heat to 62 degrees next winter to keep the utility bills affordable.

They don’t want personal recriminations for episodes of the past: impeachment or convictions, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot or Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling escapades. They have already come to grips with these, processed them and segregated them in a memory box.

America’s voters want to know which candidate best understands what scares them, what hurts them and what frustrates them and who has the best ideas to reverse the sense that this great country is heading in the wrong direction and possibly careening toward an abyss of no return, scores of polls reviewed by Just the News make clear.

CNN’s moderators, the two major candidates and their campaigns should take note or risk some lasting repercussions.

Americans are in a foul mood. They don’t want to be told to ignore the realities they experience with their own eyes. They don’t want political platitudes. They don’t want any more politics of personal destruction or fodder for future attack ads.

They want solutions.

One of Trump’s longtime confidants, David Bossie, said the 45th president has been preparing to deliver what voters want Thursday night.

“He understands the American people are not voting for the past. They're voting for the future,” Bossie told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. “So if the Democrats and the partisan reporters that are acting as moderators are going to want to try to trap him in the past, he has to move past it and talk about what the American people care about, which is their futures, their children's futures.”

The issues of the past that could be raised likely will include the 2022 landmark decision to reverse Roe v. Wade and return abortion legality to the states.

Advisers believe Trump will blunt the question by noting that one of liberals’ favorite justices, the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg, believed Roe v. Wade was terrible flawed and will say that since the high court has return the issue to states Trump trusts the wisdom of the American people – not elitists in Washington – to make the right decision for each state.

The House Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee’s effort to blame Trump for the Capitol riot could surface. Advisers believe Trump will respond by saying he agrees with Nancy Pelosi and the recently released videotape in which she, as House speaker at that time, took responsibility for failing to better securing the Capitol that day. And then he’ll pivot to the issue of the day.

Same thing with his past claims the 2020 election was stolen. Trump will remind folks he left office on Jan, 20, 2021, and that Americans care what will happen this November, not what happened four years ago.

Key Republicans predict Trump wins the debate by staying calm and focused on the issues no matter the questions.

"If Trump remains calms and collected, they [the Biden campaign] have got problems," former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg told NBC.

Biden’s strategists, meanwhile, have been pushing him to relitigate all that Trump did in his presidency and suggest he’s a threat to democracy. But some of the party’s wisest voices have been warning that could fail.

David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s presidential wins, said Biden should not relitigate old history but rather assure voters he understand their plight and discomfort.

"Well [if] he plays the debate for history instead of for votes, it stalls his own accomplishments, which I think are substantial," Axelrod told CNN recently. "That is not where the minds of voters are right now. They're thinking about their own situation and thinking about the future and he needs to recognize that.

“Both have to not make this debate about themselves, but about the American people, the future and the other guy,” he warned.

CNN needs to avoid allowing the debate to slip into past recriminations rather than the issues that define the future and also to avoid the mistake of being drawn into the debate’s issue, like prior hosts. A top CNN executive promised in recent days that is top of mind for the cable news network's moderators – to moderate and not become part of the debate.