The meme debate: Trump and Biden enter viral battlefield

• For Biden, the CNN showdown is a prime opportunity to expose voters to some of Trump's radical rhetoric and unpopular positions on issues like abortion.
• For Trump — and a right-wing ecosystem that thrives off of highlighting Biden's "senior moments" — the debate is a chance to drive home why so many voters think the president isn't up to the job.

Zoom in: Debates have always been about soundbites, but changing consumption habits mean fewer voters will see this debate in its totality than see snippets — spliced to maximize shares, and to reinforce existing narratives about the contenders.

• Trump's polling lead is fueled in large part by "lower-engaged" voters — some of whom will essentially be tuning into the race for the first time on June 27.
• Many more low-information voters will consume the debate more passively — through seconds-long social media clips that show up on their algorithmic feeds, for example.
• That means one explosive viral moment could reverberate across platforms and be seen by far more young and disengaged voters than mainstream media coverage attracts.

Between the lines: The Biden campaign believes the rules of the debates — muted microphones and no live audience — favor their candidate. But the playing field on social media has proven far harder to control.

• White House officials spent the last week accusing Republican rapid-response accounts and conservative media of spreading misleading or deceptively edited videos of Biden.
• A debunked clip of Biden appearing to wander off during a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit wound up on the front page of the New York Post — drawing a furious reaction from the White House.

• "The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from [Biden]'s record that they just lie," tweeted White House spokesman Andrew Bates, one of several officials promoting fact checks of the so-called "cheap fakes."

The other side: Conservative influencers appear undeterred by the backlash, with some pointing to a litany of public gaffes by Biden that have not been deceptively edited.

• "Cheap fake (noun): any unedited video of Joe Biden's cognitive decline that the Biden administration does not want the public to see," a Trump campaign account tweeted Wednesday.

What to watch: You can expect to see clips from the debate feature in campaign ads, with Biden holding a significant spending advantage in that space.

• But for reaching less-engaged voters who don't watch TV, the Trump campaign's powerful digital machine — which now features a rapidly growing TikTok account — will be hard to match.