The dueling town halls on Thursday night were billed by ABC and NBC as forums for ‘undecided voters’ to question the candidates. The problems begin right there with that phrase: ‘Undecided voters.’ What on earth is wrong with these people? The North Sentinelese have dutifully killed every outsider who set foot on their island in the past century, but Cockburn has no doubt that if a CNN crew could survive long enough to interview them, even they would have an opinion on Donald Trump. What excuse do Americans have? After five years of Donald Trump dominating public life, who hasn’t reached a conclusion about whether he should or should not be president? Do they need to see another five or six tweets to decide whether Trump is really a viable political outsider or just a cartoon? Can they not figure out if Joe Biden’s corn has popped?

The difficult task of finding undecided voters bright enough not to eat their own ballots makes it inevitable that a lot of town hall participants aren’t undecided at all.

One woman at Biden’s town hall demanded to know what Biden would do to protect her eight-year-old transgender child. Cockburn would like to assert without offering any evidence whatsoever that no woman who claims to have a transgender child under 10 has ever voted Republican or ever will.