It’s been a pretty shockingly eventful election year thus far, for sure. But the 2020 election cycle is finally drawing to a close as we arrive at the final debate, the second presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Normally we’d get three debates, but Trump pulled out of the last one — so here we are. And MSNBC and NBC News, as you might expect, will bring you all the coverage of the debate that you could ask for on Thursday night across a variety of platforms.
The debate is scheduled to begin on Oct. 22 at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, and MSNBC will kick off its dedicated coverage first at 8 p.m. ET with the “Decision 2020” special anchored by Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Nicolle Wallace. They’ll have Steve Kornacki on hand at the Big Board to provide polling data and whatnot. After the debate ends, Reid, Maddow and Wallace will team up with Brian Williams for continuing coverage and analysis.
Over on NBC proper, meanwhile, coverage will start up at 8 p.m. ET with Lester Holt of the “NBC Nightly News,” and “Today” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. They’re be joined by Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell.
The debate itself is also scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. ET, and end at 10:30. But it’s a live event, so no guarantees it’ll stay on schedule.
As for streaming the debate, along with MSNBC and NBC News’ coverage of Harris’ showdown with Pence, you have some options. The free NBC News Now streaming platform will carry all of NBC News’ coverage on Wednesday night. It’ll also have a debate pre-show with Chuck Todd and Kasie Hunt starting at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, before switching to Holt and Guthrie and the debate itself.
NBC News Now is available freely on YouTube right here as well as on the Peacock streaming service, and there’s also an NBC News app for mobile devices if you’d rather do that.
MSNBC’s coverage, on the other hand, won’t be freely available to stream. To watch MSNBC online you’ll need to have a valid TV provider login — once you have that, you can access its feed via MSNBC.com here, or in the NBC app, which includes stream’s of all of the NBCUniversal family of television channels.
There will be no shortage of free streams of Tuesday’s debate in addition to the one linked above. YouTube will be chock full of them, and if you so much as look at Twitter during the debate you’ll probably be greeted by a livestream there too.
Kristen Welker of NBC News will be moderating. Welker will have a new tool in her moderator arsenal after Trump couldn’t stop interrupting Biden in the first debate: a mute button.