Juan Williams: Verdict on big debate will be instantaneous

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That’s where the real time scoring will take place tonight as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump clash in the first debate of the 2016 presidential campaign.

{mosads}Politicians, journalists, movie stars, ballplayers and the college crowd will focus on the actual debate only long enough to allow them to send out zingers and put-downs about Trump and Clinton.

President Obama was judged by the Twitter universe to have lost the first 2012 debate against Mitt Romney. Liberals such as Bill Maher and Alec Baldwin cut down their candidate, Obama, in real time because he seemed too cool, not going in to bloody the Republican. 

Conservatives created a bandwagon effect by jumping on him from their side. Obama was toast.

The tweets turned against Romney in the second and third debate. Before he left the stage at both events, Romney was savaged by conservative talk show hosts and celebrities for never lambasting the president, especially failing to hammer him on Benghazi – a bloody flag for the conservative websites.

The lesson from 2012 is clear:

The 21^st century debate crowd is focused on the small screen even as they are keeping an eye on the big screen television. And wherever they are looking, they want to see fight from the candidate they came to cheer and howling from supporters of the candidate they came to jeer.

That first Obama-Romney debate set a record with 10.3 million tweets. Tonight’s debate is expected to go way over that number with an audience drawn to see Trump’s antics and pride in being politically incorrect — and how the first woman on a presidential debate stage handles him.

The critical test for each candidate is to show fire early and give their base voters reason to start the online cheerleading. That defines the opponent as bloodied.

Trump can delight his followers by calling the Democrat “crooked Hillary.” Any mention of her controversial private e-mails will get a rise on the rightwing blogs.

But given his past behavior, Trump also needs to look presidential. He has to quiet questions about his thin-skin and quick temper. In an ideal world, he would wait to skewer Clinton until she attacks him. 

The fireworks will start if she points at him and reminds the audience about his failure to open his tax returns, the scandal over his charity and his wild, often offensive remarks.

Trump got into trouble in the first GOP primary debate when my Fox News colleague Megyn Kelly recited the rude comments he had made about women. The trouble continued when another of my Fox News colleagues, Chris Wallace, knocked him back on his heels with hard questions about his firms’ many bankruptcies.

But conservative websites and Twitter loved the cruel nicknames he gave his Republican rivals, his macho bullying and his refusal to back down over errors of fact.

This time, the audience will be outside the conservative media bubble. It will be much bigger than the small-but-consistent percentage of Republicans that made him the winner against a field of 16 other candidates. When party stalwarts such as Ohio Governor John Kasich and former President George H.W. Bush say they won’t vote for Trump, it causes thoughtful Republicans to take pause.  

Trump needs to pull back in those moderate Republicans — especially younger, educated females, often suburbanites. But what pleases them is likely to be at odds with the kind of brashness that excites his current base of older, working-class whites without a college degree. They love his talk of building a border wall, shutting down trade deals and keeping out Muslim immigrants.

Clinton faces challenges of her own.

She needs to excite a Democratic base of young and minority voters, especially Latinos, who tell pollsters she is experienced and knowledgeable but also see her as a status quo candidate who lacks honesty.

For Clinton, her primary audiences tonight are Hispanics and young people who would have preferred a firebrand like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to have been the Democratic standard bearer. 

Clinton needs to speak to Latinos because current polling shows Trump is getting about the same percentage of their vote as Romney did in 2012.

True, Romney lost to Obama that year. But Clinton’s hopes of burying Trump with record-breaking support among Hispanic voters seem to slipping away. She needs the kind of firewall from Hispanic voters, especially in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, that she got from black voters in the south during the Democratic primary. 

And Clinton also has to put on a show for the young voter.

A George Washington University Battleground poll taken earlier this month showed Clinton struggling with millennials. 

Just 22 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds told pollsters Clinton “says what she believes” and only 38 percent said she is “honest and trustworthy.” 

Clinton made a direct appeal to those voters last week in a speech in Philadelphia. 

“Too many young black men and women made to feel like their lives are disposable; too many immigrants living in fear of deportation; too many young LGBT Americans, bullied; too many young women and men assaulted,” she said.

Finally, Clinton wants Republican women to hear her roar. If she can reach middle-of-the road women uncomfortable with the risk posed by Trump’s appeals to white nationalism and his lack of experience in national politics, she wins. 

Much has been written about how the 2016 election flipped the script on the old rules of campaigning, rhetoric, advertising and politics in general. Tonight will be a completely new debate experience, scored and distorted in real time by instantaneous reaction on social media. 

Fire up your hashtag for the big debate. 

Juan Williams is an author and political analyst for Fox News Channel. His latest book, “We The People: The Modern-Day Figures Who Have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers’ Vision of America” published by Crown, is out now.