So that staged presentation of the presidential candidates occurred (I won’t call it a debate, because these presidential showcases are nothing like what happens in a real debate), and Democrats lose their collective sh*t. Or at least a significant portion of them, especially among the chattering classes of the pundits, political operatives, and TV hosts. We’ve all had a couple of days to regain our balance, and I’d like to help the process along.

I haven’t researched or taught in social psychology in quite a few years, but that’s where my background and training are. Among other things, social psychologists study persuasion, social perception, and just about anything else relevant to how viewers would have processed and interpreted Thursday’s event. So I as you to consider the following .

The non-audience. Preliminary estimates are that just over 51 million people watched the debate. That’s a lot! But that number also tells us something else: the vast majority of voters didn’t watch. There were more than 158 million votes cast in the 2020 election, and more than 240 million people eligible to vote. The number of eligible voters will only have increased since then, but let’s go with those numbers. Less than 1 in 3 of the 2020 voters watched this; barely 1 in 5 of eligible voters saw this. If they didn’t watch, they weren’t influenced by it — at least not directly or right away. So let’s move to that.

News bubbles and the unpersuadable majority. Many people will be influenced in a secondhand way by all the subsequent discussion of the event: seeing snippets of the event online or on news shows, reading about it in a paper (but note that both TV news and newspapers have declined significantly as sources of news for most Americans), hearing about it from friends or family, seeing comments or clips in social media, etc. But — and this is important — American more and more consume their news in a bubble of sources and friends/family that already agree with them on most political and social issues. This is a form of what social psychologists call confirmation bias — we seek out and attend to information that confirms and validates what we already believe. Those who already believed Biden is a doddering, senile old man who can barely put two sentences together will experience a lot of confirmation of this belief. As for those of us who were expecting Trump to be a fire hose of lies and disinformation — well, we weren’t disappointed, were we?

But neither group is really persuadable, and certainly not on the basis of one staged event. The large majority of voters are committed firmly already to Biden or Trump, and are emotionally invested in that choice. Anything that they saw from their candidate that they don’t like can be rationalized away, because that emotional commitment is powerful.The real issue is how the genuine independent, undecided group of voters in the middle — a vastly shrunken segment of the electorate — that were watching the show reacted to it. So, let’s move to the optics.

The persuadables: Yes, Biden’s presentation was awful, though he improved on some answers as the night went on. Not awful on policies and facts, but on presentation, which is what the “optics” are all about. His voice sounded weak and whispery; he was talking too fast; he was trying to recite too many statistics and policies while simultaneously trying to respond to comments by Trump, and as a result often lost his train of thought or ended up with mangled comments (“we beat Medicare”?).

But Trump was awful too. He came across as a bragging blowhard — under him, everything was “the best ever”, “the greatest”, “the most.” He came across as the stereotypical huckster, ignoring or deflecting questions to just say whatever he wanted. He projected his own misdeeds and failings onto Biden like a grade schooler chanting “I’m rubber, and you’re glue” (“Nuh-uh, it wasn’t me! You’re the liar!”). He reminded everyone of the bad qualities they disliked in Trump from the start.

The debate reactions: So let’s move past the optics. What did viewers make of what they saw? Here’s where it gets a bit more interesting. In a CNN poll of debate watchers, respondents said by a 2-1 margin (67%-33%) that Trump won. But of those who were Trump supporters predebate, 3% said they would now consider voting for Biden, while 5% of predebate Biden supporters said they would now consider Trump. This is close to a wash, suggesting a net swing of about 1% towards Trump (remember that’s 3% and 5% of each candidate’s supporters predebate, or about 1.5% and 2.5% of the total viewers). And because we should never, never, never rely on one poll to draw conclusions, here’s another: an Ipsos poll of likely voters (including those who watched and those who didn’t) found that among likely voters, the percent who said they would consider voting for Biden slipped by 1.6%, from 48.2% to 46.7%. Trump gained very slightly with this group, from 43.5 % to 43.9%, a 0.4% increase. The mathematically inclined will also note that the percent considering Biden remained larger than that considering Trump, by nearly 3 points. Although there are other polling questions that have been consistently bad for Biden (such as the “too old” results), those are nothing new, and these post-debate results do not suggest some collapse in support. So let’s turn to a final thought: voter attention spans.

Does it even matter? A large majority of American voters are already committed to Biden or Trump, due to the tribal, in-group, personal identity dimensions that politics have taken on in recent decades. Of the rest, most registered or eligible voters are basically not paying attention at the start of summer. Really, they aren’t. We haven’t even had the spectacle of the party conventions yet. We haven’t entered the most intensive phase of the campaigns, and advertising. By the first week in November, there will be very, very few voters even thinking about this “debate” because too much will have happened (in both American politics and the broader world) since then. A vague sense that Biden didn’t do well in the first debate is the most that any will have left, to the extent they think of it at all.

So: Biden can recover, and easily, from a bad night. If the Joe Biden who showed up in North Carolina the day after the debate keeps showing up on the campaign trail, whatever minimal damage occurred (and I would estimate it at about a 1% loss in support) can and will be overcome.