It's certainly possible that, with a little more focus, Trump could avoid handing Clinton lines that she can use against him for the rest of the campaign, as he did when he not only admitted to paying no federal taxes but said proudly that it shows how smart he is. But the reason why the second debate a week from Sunday could go even worse for him is that it will be in a town hall format, which plays even more to Clinton's strengths. Donald Trump stands to do even worse in the second debate than the first. Credit:AP The audience for the next debate will be made up of undecided voters selected by the Gallup organisation. They will ask the bulk of the questions with others asked by the moderators, including some chosen from questions submitted by the public on this website. There are a few critical things to understand about this format, which has been used since 1992. The first is that the questions asked by ordinary citizens are much less predictable than the questions asked by a single journalist moderator or a panel of journalists. While they're almost always substantive, they often raise issues that haven't been discussed much in the campaign, and can do so from unusual angles. That favours a candidate whose understanding of policy is not only deep but broad - in other words, someone who can give a lengthy exegesis on the Affordable Care Act, but who could also offer a few coherent sentences on the Law of the Sea Treaty if it were necessary. We know which candidate that describes. Secondly, the setting of a town hall debate, with the candidates sitting and walking around amid a group of voters, creates a different dynamic that Trump may not be attuned to. By many accounts, he's itching to attack Clinton because her husband cheated on her, and he can't stop himself from saying over and over that former Miss Universe Alicia Machado is contemptible because she gained weight. It's one thing to do that when you're talking to Bill O'Reilly or calling in to Fox & Friends, but just picture the cameras picking up the shocked and disgusted faces of women in the debate audience as he launches some of those insults.

Finally and most importantly, in a town hall debate we're not only watching the candidates tell us what they think, we're watching them interact with the people who ask the questions. The character of that interaction can be as important to our interpretation as the substance. You might recall the 1992 town hall debate during which a citizen asked: "How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives?" We're ten days from the second debate, and Hillary Clinton could do even better. Credit:AP Answering first, George H.W. Bush took the somewhat confusing question literally, and struggled to answer her in a satisfying way as he looked uncertainly around the room, even growing defensive at one point ("Are you suggesting that if somebody has means, that the national debt doesn't affect them?") When it was Bill Clinton's turn, he understood that she wasn't really asking about the debt at all. He said, "Tell me how it's affected you again?" as he walked over to get as close to her as he could. "You know people who have lost their jobs, lost their homes?" His eyes locked on hers, Clinton talked about how the state of the economy affected people he knew and the rest of the country.

What people remembered wasn't the substance of the two answers, it was how Clinton immediately connected with that voter and seemed to care deeply about her and what she was worried about. This was the "I feel your pain" Bill Clinton, and voters loved it. What you may not realise is that, while Hillary Clinton gets a lot of criticism for not being a natural performer and not being good at delivering a speech, this kind of exchange - between her and one voter, where she can make a connection with that person and relate their particular question to broader concerns - is something she's really, really good at. For instance, a clip from a town hall meeting during the primaries, in which a rabbi asks Clinton a very difficult and unexpected question about how someone in her position balances the need to be confident enough to be president and still retain humility. In that moment, Clinton is engaging, thoughtful, personal, and candid (even if she's still obviously considering her answer like any politician). To a great extent, this is the most natural place for her, where she can talk the substance of issues but also connect with people one at a time. People close to her often lament that the charming and charismatic Hillary Clinton they know in private doesn't come through on the campaign trail, but one-on-one interactions are the closest approximation, even if there are millions of people watching. Could Donald Trump answer a question like that one without coming off as a complete jackass? Or answer a series of questions from individual citizens about things that matter deeply to them in a way that makes it appear that he genuinely cares about them? Can he stand up in front of one person, look them in the eye for longer than a few seconds, and communicate some measure of empathy? Based on what we've seen from him so far, there's little reason to think he can. That's partly because it's something Trump almost never does. Clinton does many campaign events in small groups, where she'll meet students or immigrants or business owners and have long conversations about what matters to them. Trump, on the other hand, seldom gets closer to voters than the distance between the first row and the podium at his rallies. But it's more than lack of practice - it's just not who he is. Whatever Trump's talents, he's not a people person. You don't watch him talking to an ordinary Joe and say, "That guy really cares."

All of that means that at the second debate Clinton will be right in her element, and Trump will be even further out of his. Even if he works hard to prepare, it will be difficult for him to do much better than he did the first time around. From what we're hearing, he could be headed for an outright debacle. Loading Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect. The Washington Post