With two presidential debates scheduled long before the election, there's time to swap out a poorly performing candidate

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The presidential “debates” proposed by the Joe Biden campaign and accepted by his chief opponent, Donald Trump, look less like a face-to-face matchup between two political contenders than competency assessments. While so rule-constrained as to offer little in the way of a test of the candidates’ mettle, the early date of the first meeting offers nervous partisans — Democrats in particular — a last opportunity to reconsider their choice of standard-bearer before party nominations are formalized.

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TV host Bill Maher remarked on the scheduling of the two presidential debates last week: “I’ve never seen a summer debate, not for the presidential elections. They’re always in October right before the election. June 27th? They haven’t had the convention yet.”

That’s true of both Biden, whose party will gather in Chicago to nominate a presidential candidate in August, and Trump, who can’t be formally nominated until his supporters rally in Milwaukee in July. Until then, both are technically dominant contenders to lead their parties into election season; they’re likely to be coronated, but have yet to be awarded the crown.

So, why the early meetup? With the first debate scheduled for June 27, when normal Americans are more concerned about vacations than politics, and the second for Sept. 10, almost two months before election day, it looks like the dates were chosen to minimize the audience for a clash of political not-titans.

That’s especially true for Biden’s worried team: one anonymous Democratic U.S. senator told The Hill this month, “If you go out........

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