Trump has less than 2 weeks to turn around dire numbers, and Biden didn't do him any favors in the debate

• The Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is up about 10 points in national polling and has a solid lead in more than enough swing states to get to 270 electoral votes.
• President Donald Trump needs something to dynamically change the tenor of the race.
• He almost certainly didn't get it Thursday night at the final presidential debate.

President Donald Trump on Thursday night had his final outing on a debate stage, and while pundits will argue about his performance, the only real question worth asking is this:

Did anything happen on that television broadcast that will ding Joe Biden's 9.9-percentage-point lead within the next 12 days?

Did Biden, who leads by about 10 points in national polling, say something that would jeopardize the Democratic presidential nominee's lead? Did Trump do something that would win people back? Was that event so obvious that it would change the tenor of the race in roughly a week and a half? If the answer isn't objectively yes, then this debate went poorly for the president.

Trump isn't running against Biden anymore; he's running against time. As of Thursday morning, at least 47 million people had voted in the 2020 US presidential election. As of Thursday afternoon, Trump was down in the polls by about 4.9 points in Pennsylvania, 4.6 points in Wisconsin, 2.1 points in Florida, and 3.2 points in Arizona. As of Thursday night, there were less than two weeks' worth of evening-news broadcasts left before election night.

He has a lot of distance to cover, and he's running out of time to do it. Every day that is not a positive development for Trump is a loss.

This is what has made his handling of the debates so puzzling. These are large prime-time broadcasts covered by every major network and seen by tens of millions of people. The debates are currency he could use to change the news narrative, but Trump's experiences on the debate stage have been fraught with difficulties this year.

His first outing received strongly negative reactions in terms of his demeanor. But regardless of how the event itself was received, mere days later the narrative shifted to speculating whether he was infectious with the coronavirus during the event. The subsequent week was spent discussing the president's illness from a virus that has defined his administration, whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been remarkably unpopular with the American people.

He pulled out of the second debate after it was moved to a virtual setting, and it was replaced with an event that reached a paltry fraction of the viewership that a wall-to-wall official debate would have enjoyed.

His third debate, while certainly broadcast to significantly more people than the town hall, did little to seriously undermine Biden's case for the presidency and therefore failed to bolster Trump's.

In response to a question about an issue Trump is viewed relatively well on — foreign policy, where the American people give his presidency mediocre approval numbers rather than objectively bad — he instead pivoted to discuss Biden's son, who is not a national figure.

In the end, what was the most damaging thing Biden said at the debate?

The comment most likely to hurt Biden was probably a moment at the end, when Biden described his environmental policy and indicated that by 2050 he would like to see fewer emissions from the oil and gasoline business, a remark to which Trump answered by specifically mentioning Pennsylvania (which has a lucrative if controversial hydraulic-fracturing industry) and Texas (the ancestral and corporate home of American petroleum firms) as places where that remark might hurt him.

Realistically, though, it's not obvious how that really harms Biden's chances of winning the presidency. Do 5% of Pennsylvanians vote based on the fortunes of a niche extractive business over a 30-year time horizon? Probably not.

How about Texas? Well, while Biden would surely be thrilled to win Texas — he's down 4 points — any map in which Biden wins Texas is most likely one in which he has already won a substantial number of electoral votes. According to FiveThirtyEight, Texas has a paltry 1.8% chance of being the tipping-point state in the election, so in a tiny fraction of universes is Biden seriously regretting his choice of words.

All told, at the beginning of September, Trump had a serious chance to reach the American people and communicate his strengths and his rival's failures. Instead, he was unable to control the conversation as he adeptly did in 2016. He has less than two weeks to overcome a significant deficit in a half-dozen states, and Thursday night probably didn't help.