| We're supposed to be in the run-up to the conventions, but with those events going virtual and generating even less excitement than usual, the presidential race seems to be skipping ahead to perhaps its most dismal phase: the debate over debates. The gist of the story is that Donald Trump's campaign is pretending that Joe Biden is going to duck the debates, presumably as part of their effort to smear Biden as cognitively impaired. That Biden has already accepted the debates and that he did fine in numerous nomination debates doesn't seem to factor into Team Trump's thinking. So Trump has moved up the debate over debates as part of that pretense. (People have speculated for years that Trump will duck the debates himself. I find that unlikely; he certainly seems to believe that he can talk his way out of anything. But I suppose it's possible that he is making demands as part of a scheme to back out when those demands are not met. Biden is making no demands at this point, and in general he's done nothing at all so far to prepare for any potential exit strategy.) What does sort of make sense is that Trump is asking for four debates, rather than the traditional three. Typically, the candidate behind in the polls asks for more debates; even though debates rarely have any significant effects on vote choice, a campaign in trouble will figure it has little to lose by trying. Team Trump is also asking to move up the schedule. Currently, the debates will be on Sept. 29, Oct. 15, and Oct. 22 (with the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 7); the Trump campaign is asking for the final late-October event to move to early September. While their request for the first week of September is probably a bit too soon, it's not a bad idea; after all, many people will have voted by Oct. 22. Remember, however: Debates may get a lot of attention from the media, but general-election debates rarely have any significant effect on election results. As with most campaign events, those who are most likely to pay careful attention are the people most interested in politics, and those are likely to be strong partisans who were going to vote for their party's candidate no matter what. Not only that, but people watch debates through the filter of their previous preferences, so Trump voters are likely to think the president did well while Biden voters are likely to believe the former vice president "won." This isn't a flaw in the system. Politics in a democracy isn't primarily about one-on-one verbal confrontations with the winner entitled to rule. It's not debate club, nor is it a Hollywood movie. People have all kinds of very good reasons for supporting a candidate and a party, and the idea that they would or should change their minds because a campaign has better zingers or better canned applause lines gets the whole nature of democratic politics all wrong. Which is not to say that debates are useless. The main value of debates is that they are extremely high-profile events focused, for the most part, on public policy — which means that the things that the eventual president says in the debates are among his or her most visible, and therefore most important, policy promises. Candidates also have the opportunity to make implicit promises of how they will behave as president. In other words, presidential debates have become somewhat important portions of how representation works in presidential politics. That's pretty important! It just doesn't have much to do with who wins or loses the election. 1. Keneshia Grant on criticisms of the vice-presidential hopefuls. 2. Maneesh Arora at the Monkey Cage on the protests and the pandemic. 3. Kelly Dittmar on all the women running in 2020. 4. Courtney Kennedy with a nice primer on election polling. 5. Stuart Rothenberg on the state of the Senate elections. 6. And Dahlia Lithwick and Steve Vladeck on John Roberts as a campaign issue. | 
Post a Comment