Will the Debates Matter? The Media Doesn't Care.

Nobody had more cause for elation at the news that Joe Biden and Donald Trump might pair off in a debate than the hungry campaign press corps. Cheated out of a real primary season contest since Trump and Biden promptly rolled their opponents, the prospect of a June 27 showdown on CNN and another on Sept. 10 on ABC has made the campaign pressies giddy. Even a few press critics, similarly starved for fresh campaign grist, could be seen this morning doing victory dances.

It should be noted that experienced political journalists can write for weeks and weeks in the absence of actual campaign news, just as baseball beat reporters can fill thousands of column inches between the last game of the World Series and the first day of spring training. But there’s nothing like the pageantry and bombast of a presidential debate to fill the airwaves, headlines and homepages. And the fact that this first debate is scheduled months before its traditional time has boosted the euphoria. It’s a particular coup for CNN and ABC, who will surely promote the heck out of the debates.

But what sort of effect will the proposed two debates, which seem destined to replace the four previously scheduled by the now-shunned Commission on Presidential Debates, have on the remainder of the campaign? Will they change any voters’ minds? Will they, like many recent “debates,” degenerate into a shouting match and media spectacle? What can we do to prevent the face-off from turning into a carnival with Trump as the ringmaster — as was the case in his sparring with Hillary Clinton and Biden? And will anybody watch? The 2020 debate between Trump and Biden attracted fewer viewers than the one between Trump and Clinton, and fewer than the one between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Like sportswriters, campaign journalists arrive at these matches with scorecards in hand and a determination to declare a winner. But their scorekeeping does not appear particularly valuable.

One sturdy example from the campaign debate genre has always been the “Who won the debate?” story. But how much does that matter? According to Gallup, H. Ross Perot beat both Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in the 1992 debates, and John Kerry enjoyed a polling bump after his 2004 debate with George W. Bush. And you may recall that Clinton won all three debates against Trump decisively, according to the CNN/ORC poll of debate watchers, and we know how much that benefited her in the long run. (Being declared the winner clearly matters to the candidates. Biden, of course, insisted in the video he posted to X that he bettered Trump in both 2020 debates.)

Journalist/statistician Nate Silver acknowledges that debates can influence the election but says they tend to have “a sell-by date.”

“Perhaps the paradigmatic example being the first debate in 2012, when [Mitt] Romney got a boost in the polls that faded after a couple of weeks,” Silver tells me. “With that said, it’s all relative: Almost nothing moves the polls these days because the candidates are so well known and everybody is so partisan. So, they don’t matter that much, but they still matter more than most process-type things.”

Whittling Silver’s observation to a sharper point: Among well-known candidates, Trump and Biden are the most well-known ever. The Trump megaphone has been working at high volume for most of his adult life and this will mark his third appearance on the national ballot. Biden runs for president on a schedule that rivals migratory birds for periodicity. If you haven’t formed an opinion on them by now, you’ve likely been living in a fallout shelter with only a hand-cranked Conelrad radio for information.

Still, one reason the debates might actually matter this year is Biden’s age. Polls show the public is worried that the president may be too old to do the job, and Biden’s performance could do a lot to either allay those fears or confirm them.

John Dickerson, who anchors a nightly news program for CBS and moderated Republican and Democratic presidential debates in the 2016 cycle, offers his ideas for improving the debates. First, he tells me, we must agree on what we want from the debates, which should include less than scintillating answers to crucial questions.

“Debates are about testing whether the job applicants have the attributes for the job they want and testing their views against the requirements of the office. Most of the questions I’d ask would be considered odd and very unentertaining,” Dickerson says via email.

To succeed, moderators must have the authority to select the questions, but they must also keep the debaters on point, ask follow-ups and keep the time, he says. But for a debate to work, both participants must also share a belief in basic norms, like the fact that the 2020 election wasn’t “stolen.”

“The practiced answers from leaders in the [Republican] party about accepting the results of 2024 sow doubt about the electoral system. If you don’t believe in free and fair elections, the rule of law or verifiable information, why are you going to grant authority to a debate moderator? A moderator cannot operate in those conditions to achieve a good result,” says Dickerson.

CNN should be applauded for agreeing to host the debate without a studio audience, as it will discourage the scenery-stealing antics that Trump and Al Gore engaged in during previous debates. Also, the arrival of the debates five months before the November election has its advantages. With more and more voters casting early ballots, the Commission on Presidential Debates’ schedule of four debates between mid-September and the second week in October seems antiquated, a point the Trump and Biden campaigns have made.

Unless Trump changes his act or Biden takes a meal-sized dose of Adderall, don’t expect the CNN or ABC debates to move the election either way. But we should be happy for our friends in the press and their loyal readers for the improvement it will bring to their copy. As with Detroit cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when a few changes in sheet metal could create the illusion that a new model has been designed, a couple of summer clashes between Trump and Biden is just what political pros and hobbyists crave.

Mitt Romney spoke for all of us on Wednesday when he told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic how much he looked forward to the debate. “It’ll be entertaining, informative. Like the two old guys on the Muppets.”

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Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not yet hit those marks. Is this rule fair? Send your answer to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are currently being honored. My Twitter and Threads never debate. My defunct RSS feed believes the candidates should resolve their differences like the gladiators in Spartacus.