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One of the few bipartisan traditions left in American politics is hating on the presidential debates. They’re never substantive enough, the moderators always intervene too much or too little, and they have little effect on voters. Who needs ‘em?
So reports that President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are contemplating skipping this year’s edition, put on by the Commission on Presidential Debates every four years since 1988, are hardly surprising. Trump didn’t participate in any Republican primary debates either, and the Republican National Committee withdrew from the debate commission two years ago. Biden has declined to commit to its 2024 schedule.
It is left to me to … well, if I can’t quite defend the debates, I can at least say this: We’ll miss them when they’re gone. The only thing worse than presidential debates may be a campaign without them.
Of course, American democracy long predates the tradition of televised presidential debates.
And the tradition itself had a rough start. Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy famously faced off in 1960, but Lyndon Johnson saw no need to risk a debate in 1964. Nixon, with a commanding lead and embittered by his prior debate experience, likewise declined to debate in 1968 and 1972. It wasn’t until 1976, with a matchup between President Gerald Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter, that the modern debate era begins.
The tradition was truly entrenched eight years later by incumbent Ronald Reagan, who agreed to debate Walter Mondale in 1984. The debates had no real upside for Reagan, who was on his way to a landslide win, and in fact he was widely seen to have stumbled during the first debate. Once he established the norm, however, it was off to the races. The Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987, and has sponsored debates in the last nine presidential elections. Now the burden is on presidents to explain why they can’t debate, instead of on the commission to say why they should.
None of this is to say that these debates have been grand exchanges of ideas in the tradition of Lincoln and Douglas in 1858.
Indeed, in a pedantic sense they are hardly “debates” at all. The candidates exchange talking points, deliver a handful of rehearsed quips, and the “winner” is often proclaimed on a somewhat arbitrary basis by the media.
And yet for all their flaws, the debates do offer something magical: They are a shared national political experience. Devoted partisans on both sides will watch, along with the tiny handful of high-information swing voters who actually pay close attention to political campaigns.
One fact often obscured by America’s highly polarized two-party politics is that the US is a very large and diverse country. Both party coalitions include lots of people who have significant disagreements with each other. The easiest way to manage those disagreements is to keep your partisans focused on the negative aspects of the other side, often by serving up highly caricatured portrayals of your opponents. At this point, it almost seems as if the majority of Democrats and Republicans are convinced that the other party’s nominee is senile.
There’s a way to gainsay that impression — and inform voters of the rivals’ actual positions on the issues: Put the two candidates side by side on a debate stage for an extended period of time. Biden partisans could watch Trump talk in uninterrupted stretches, and vice versa. That’s very unlikely to dramatically change anyone’s opinion. But it would be a small step toward a healthier society with something more resembling a consensus reality.
The problem is that the very media fragmentation that makes debates valuable also makes them increasingly vulnerable. There were significant downsides to the three-TV-network monopoly, but it gave national politics some grounding and focus. In today’s landscape, almost nothing short of a debate can provide that common focus.
At the same time, politicians have less to lose from ducking debates because they no longer need the cooperation of the mainstream media to get their message out. The difficulty of getting the tradition off the ground was always the fear that the front-runner would regard it as too risky. The flipside is that ducking a debate would also be a risk. Nobody wants to look chicken.
For Trump, in particular, to make hay out of his opponent’s alleged mental acuity and then hide from the cameras is a bad look. But it’s only a bad look in a world where people care what mainstream media has to say. A contemporary candidate can speak to his audience through his preferred social media channels and party-aligned media with or without the help of more mainstream outlets.
Beyond that, there are simply many more media outlets today that are hungry for content.
In any economic environment, returns accrue to the scarce factors of production, which in this case is the candidates themselves. If they want to appear on television, it will be at a time and a setting of their choosing. Presidents, of course, have become increasingly hesitant to do even this. Biden has done fewer press conferences than not only Trump but also Barack Obama. And it’s hard to blame them. Modern presidents can tweet, vlog, TikTok or whatever else if they want people to hear what they have to say rather than fielding hardballs from reporters trying to trip them up.
Debates, for all their flaws, are a rare opportunity to get out of those silos and make everyone who pays attention to the news watch and argue about more or less the same thing. That in and of itself obviously doesn’t end partisanship or polarization or anything else. But it’s something. And if it fades away, we’ll miss it.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”