Let's Put an End to Presidential Debates

Be honest: Do they actually help voters make a good decision?

Photo by Elbert Barnes

News organizations are getting worried that disagreements between the Trump and Biden campaigns could mean that for the first time since 1972, there will be no general election presidential debates in this election. According to the New York Times, the five major broadcast and cable networks are preparing an open letter to the campaigns urging them both to participate in debates.

If it doesn’t happen, we’ll certainly miss the opportunity for a big news event, with lots of eager coverage before (“Will there be gaffes? Please, let there be gaffes!”) and breathless coverage after (“OMG did you see the gaffes?!?”). But will the country actually lose anything if these two men don’t debate?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Debates can be interesting, even entertaining. But taking everything into account, they do more harm than good to the country’s ability to make a wise decision about who should be president. So I’ll come out and say it: There should be no more presidential debates.

My views on this have changed over the years. My earlier perspective was influenced in part by my graduate school mentor, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who long argued that for all their limitations and ways they could be improved, televised debates are still an extremely useful exercise amid campaigns drowning in triviality. She even once wrote a book making that case. That was essentially my position too: Yes, they’re awful, but at least voters get to hear these two candidates talk for a couple of hours, and sometimes actual policy discussion sneaks its way in, which is more than you can say for most of the ways people learn about the campaign and the candidates. So on net, it’s probably a positive.

But in one election after another, I’ve written articles noting that while debates could be useful, the ones we just witnessed were not. At long last, I’ve lost faith that they’re going to get any better. From the very idea of bringing the candidates onto the same stage so they can snipe at each other for two hours, to the way debates are designed, to the way they’re parsed and interpreted afterward, nearly everything about them is harmful to informed and deliberative voter decision-making.

Why there might not be debates this year anyway

Two years ago, the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to refuse to participate in any debate run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has been running the general election presidential debate process since the 1988 race. The CPD was meant to be bipartisan — it’s always co-chaired by one Republican and one Democrat — and while it may be a bit stodgy, the Republican claim that it’s biased against them is ludicrous, unless you think that any debate not moderated by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson is a liberal scam.

But recently, Donald Trump has been saying that he’s happy to debate Joe Biden, probably because it’s a situation in which he knows he can perform a kind of bullying dominance. As we saw in their first debate four years ago, Trump will interrupt and talk over Biden, who is too committed to the norms of good behavior to just start yelling back (though at one point in that debate he did say “Will you shut up, man?”). Trump and his aides also surely think that Biden is losing his edge and will be undone by his stutter, so Trump will be the victor.

The Biden campaign hasn’t made a firm commitment either way, though they bring up that first 2020 debate to suggest that trying to have a civil discussion with Trump is pointless. And even though debates usually have little or no effect on the outcome of the election, Biden may decide there isn’t much upside to participating, particularly if Trump will inevitably turn it into a clown show. 

It’s not like this anymore, and even this wasn’t that great. (United Press International via Wikimedia Commons)

Why debates are bad

If they don’t happen, all of us who are interested in politics may feel deprived. So let’s remind ourselves of the reasons debates are bad.

This has nothing to do with being president. The unspoken premise is that if someone performs well in a debate, it shows they’ll be a good president. But just saying that out loud shows how absurd an idea it is. Debates favor smooth delivery, fake sincerity, and glibness, none of which make you a good president. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were both very good at debating, and wherever you stand politically, you probably think at least one of them was a horrible president. 

It’s not as though debates demonstrate some skill a president will have to employ on a regular basis. Joe Biden doesn’t have to triumph in a televised tete-a-tete with Mitch McConnell to get a bill passed, or debate Vladimir Putin in order to support Ukraine. That’s not how being president works. 

The format is terrible. Rather than any of a number of useful ways debates could be designed — say by focusing on a single topic and allowing for some real back-and-forth — they’re built to bring out the worst in everybody. The “You get 2 minutes to answer and you get 1 minute to respond” guarantees shallowness. Having an audience allows for whoops and hollers that don’t help things. And the moderators have largely been incapable of asking questions that will elicit something enlightening.

For that, I blame Bernard Shaw more than anyone. In a 1988 debate, Shaw asked Michael Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for her killer?”, an utterly idiotic question that had precisely nothing to do with what kind of president Dukakis would be. The president’s position on the death penalty is irrelevant (almost all executions happen at the state level), and the fact that Dukakis opposed it was well-known. When Dukakis failed to pound the lectern with his fist and cry “I’ll kill that bastard myself!” he was crucified for being insufficiently emotional, and Shaw was hailed by his colleagues as a journalistic hero. The lesson: Substance is for suckers, and “tough” reporters go for the gaffe. 

Every debate moderator since has dreamed of duplicating Shaw’s feat, so we’ve seen a hundred iterations, all premised on a pose of confrontation (“Why aren’t you doing better in the polls?”) that does nothing to probe what candidates really think and what they’d do.

The press coverage after the debate is always dreadful. Most of what people remember from the debates will be not what they saw (if they watched at all) but what got repeated over and over by the news media afterward. That coverage is focused on the meaningless question of who “won,” as the reporters treat the event as nothing more than a series of zingers and gaffes, with their job being to judge which ones were most zingy and gaffe-tastic. 

Think back on what you can remember (or remember hearing about) from previous debates: Trump interrupting Joe Biden or looming over Hillary Clinton, Al Gore sighing, “You’re no Jack Kennedy,” “There you go again,” Nixon’s flop sweat. They were all highlighted and repeated by reporters precisely because they reinforced something negative reporters already believed about a candidate. It wasn’t that they were untrue (Dan Quayle really was a lightweight, for instance), it’s just that they didn’t offer anything new or enlightening. And within a few days, the moments reporters have chosen to highlight are all anyone remembers.

That doesn’t mean the rest of the campaign is helpful or edifying, because it isn’t. But I’ve struggled to answer this question: Will debates between Trump and Biden help voters make their decision about who should be president for the next four years? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the answer is an emphatic no.

Endnotes

• As you may know, my co-author Tom Schaller and I have been taking a lot of criticism over our book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. We answer our critics in this article in The New Republic: “An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue”

• On the latest episode of Boundary Issues, the podcast I co-host with my sister Ayelet, we talk to Issa Amro, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist, about what has been going in the West Bank and his own recent arrest and torture. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.