Two Cheers for the Debates
They ain't much. But might as well preserve them.
Suddenly, we have debates: Joe Biden proposed two dates to Donald Trump on Wednesday, and Trump said yes - and within hours media sponsors had stepped up, as Biden proposed, to replace the commission that’s run these things since the 1980s. The candidates will debate on CNN on June 27 and on ABC on September 10.
Unless they don’t. It’s one thing to agree to dates and sponsors; it’s another thing to actually hold the debate. We’ll see. If either campaign wants to duck debates, they will, regardless of whether they initially agree to it - or, for that matter, propose it.
There’s a long history of general election presidential debates not affecting election outcomes, and there’s no reason to expect anything different during this cycle. Most of the punditry around the campaign strategy involved is because pundits are supposed to analyze strategy, and there’s not much to analyze. For that matter, campaign strategists are paid good money for choosing smart strategies, but there’s very little evidence that anything beyond doing obvious things actually makes much of a difference.1
Oh, and by the way: That includes all the talk about Biden solving doubts about his age by performing well in debate. Biden after all his been through multiple supposed tests of his ability to handle the office despite being old, and “passing” those tests - most recently in giving a solid State of the Union speech complete with post-speech conversations with members of Congress until they turned the lights out on him - does nothing. Most likely because worries about Biden’s age are effects, not causes, of his weak approval ratings. And the same, I should say, for worries about Trump’s age.2
So if debates don’t affect outcomes, why should we have them? Political scientist and debate hater Dave Hopkins has made the case against them:
There are two main problems with debates. First, they are framed in advance as valuable exercises in political deliberation and public edification even though they are actually treated as a form of entertainment and as one more arena of partisan competition. Second, the media commentators whose interpretations affect public perceptions of the outcome often decide who "won" and who "lost" on fairly silly grounds. Cracking a pre-written joke, sighing into a microphone, having too much on-camera energy or not enough—are these really the moments upon which the leadership of the nation should properly turn?
I can’t argue with any of that. But the debates do have value. They have come to be among the best-known US rituals of democracy, and retaining such things is even more important now that democracy is under fire. I’ve never been a big fan of the values that debates implicitly ascribe to democracy - rational discussion of “the issues” as a core virtue isn’t what I think we should aspire to. But the bottom line is that debates and the hoopla surrounding them celebrate collective self-government, and that’s something we should try to keep.
Debates have also come to be important parts of the process of representation. Representation involves candidates making promises about what they’ll do and who they will be should they win office, and the debates are one of the few times during the campaign that the candidates actually make those promises live to a very large audience. As with debates as rituals of democracy, I don’t really think that the debates - certainly not as they have actually evolved - are particularly well-suited to that job. But if they disappeared there’s no guarantee that anything better (or anything at all) would replace them, so again it’s better to have them than not.3
All of which means that I’ll mostly skip the discussion about how the debates could be better. They are what they are, and marginally better rules or presentation aren’t really relevant to the actual virtues of holding them.
What is a tougher question is whether this cycle’s debates can be a useful ritual of democracy when Donald Trump is running as an authoritarian and attempted, as president, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. David Frum has argued that including Trump in a debate after January 6, 2021 normalizes what should be treated as unacceptable. That’s a reasonable argument. One might argue, however, that Trump’s participation in a debate would itself be a form, however weak, of accepting the legitimacy of the upcoming election, and that too can perhaps be a meaningful signal to be sent, even if Trump doesn’t really mean it. And it also allows the nation to retain a ritual of democracy that will most likely die if it’s not repeated this cycle. Especially if the candidate who cancels it is the one trying to stand for the virtue of republican government.4
So on the whole I guess I’d rather these events take place than not. Rah.
Campaign strategies and the folks who divise them can be extremely important…in contests where partisanship isn’t a factor (such as primary elections) or where little is known about the candidates. Presidential general elections have exactly the circumstances where campaign strategies are the least important.
The worries are legitimate - they’re both old! - even though there’s basically no evidence at all that Biden is having problems so far, and at best only very minimal evidence of age-related problems for Trump (yes, he babbles incoherently, but there’s no way of knowing that’s a function of aging).
Matt Glassman emphasizes the “deadline” aspect of debates, which force campaigns to make decisions on policy questions. I’m somewhat skeptical that they have that function…drafting the party platform is usually much more of a deadline-type situation, while any decent candidate (and staff) can come up with scripted non-answers to debate questions if that’s what they want. Still, Matt could be correct.
I’m far more skeptical that the apparent demise of the debate commission will matter towards whether future debates are held. Candidates who perceive participation as not in their interest in the abstract probably have participated anyway because of the perceived costs of defying tradition, but I very much doubt that the current insitutionalization of the debates is important to that. But if Biden bails and then wins the election, it’s hard to picture why any future incumbent would participate.