Experts say the relevance of this ritual is hanging on by a thread.
Political debates have long been an American tradition, allowing voters a chance to watch candidates face off on the issues they care about most before heading to cast their ballot.
Plus, in deeply polarizing times when Americans can’t seem to agree on anything, they can be a surprising source of entertainment, thanks to the memes that often follow, such as the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head for two whole minutes during his 2020 Vice Presidential Debate with then-Sen. Kamala Harris.
But do we really need debates as part of the Democratic voting process? Donald Trump clearly doesn’t think so — and even some experts say these events are at increased risk for becoming an outdated custom. Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky points out that Americans don’t necessarily need to tune in anymore, thanks to the easy access to around-the-clock news sources. And it shows: The last GOP primary standoff in September had less than 10 million tuning in, marking the lowest TV viewership of any Republican presidential debate since Donald Trump became a candidate.
“Debates have become significantly less important than they used to be — there’s no doubt about that,” says Chervinsky. “This has largely to do with the saturation of media coverage and the diversification of news sources and outlets.”
To dig into the pros and cons of these political showdowns, we explored the origins of debates — and why some presidential hopefuls are leaving them in the dust.
When did we start having debates, anyway?
These public exchanges of ideas can be traced all the way back to 1858, during an Illinois Senate race between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, says John J. Pitney, Jr., a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. Back then, debates looked quite different than what we see today.
For starters, there were no moderators. Instead, Lincoln and Douglas would take turns giving remarks. Though the order would often change, the first speaker would usually talk for 60 minutes, then the second for 90 minutes, followed by a potential 30-minute response. (Mind you, these lengthy speeches were usually held outside in the brutal heat or bitter cold.)
“The format of the debate was very daunting,” Pitney says. “On top of there not being a moderator, there were no questions from reporters and no real back and forth. It was just a format that allowed the candidates to discuss their ideas at great length.”
While the Lincoln-Douglas debates eventually evolved into the format we recognize in the modern era, they weren’t a standard feature of 20th-Century presidential politics until the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960.
When it comes to comparing the debates of the past to what we experience now, Pitney doesn’t believe either format is particularly ideal. While candidates these days use their stage time to recite soundbites scripted for maximum impact, the original way they were conducted wasn’t exactly engaging. (Think of the dense, snooze-worthy lectures you could barely sit through in college.)
How have some candidates broken this tradition?
Trump has so far skipped the Republican primary debates entirely this year, citing his large lead over the rest of the field as evidence that he’s already well-known (and well-liked) by voters ahead of the 2024 election. There’s some truth to that — the former president leads his fellow conservatives in polling that shows him hovering around 60 percent support.His nearest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, lingers around 13 percent, according to RealClearPolitics, which aggregates recent polls.
So it’s probably no surprise that Trump’s campaign has even gone so far as to urge the Republican National Committee to “immediately put an end to any further primary debates,” so the party can “refocus its manpower” on beating President Biden in 2024. (Per The New York Times, the RNC has dismissed the idea, with GOP figures like Vermont Republican Party chairman Paul Dame calling the mere suggestion “a slap in the face of voters.”)
So far, it looks like Trump is getting a hall pass for his absence. According to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll released on Oct. 31, 57 percent of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers say it doesn’t matter to them if Trump shows up to the GOP presidential debates, while 42 percent believe he should participate in at least one debate before the caucuses are held on Jan. 15.
Then again, what Trump’s doing isn’t exactly unprecedented: Pitney points out that President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to debate at all during his 1964 campaign, and he went on to win the general election by a landslide, capturing more than 61 percent of the vote against rival Barry Goldwater, who managed 38.5 percent. Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter similarly thought these televised showdowns were a needless risk that could jeopardize their massive leads.
But are debates really a valuable use of anyone’s time? Pickney says part of the problem is that the field of primary candidates has gotten too big, and most people have already made up their minds before the contenders ever take the stage — especially by the time the major parties have picked their nominees. “General election debates don’t make much difference because people don’t watch the debates to make up their minds,” he says. “They watch the debates to root for their favorite.”
How can debates be improved?
By this point, you might be wondering, “Wait, aren’t debates critical to our Democracy and voting process?” Well, our experts don’t think we should write them off completely, though they say we should change the way we approach them. One possible solution would be not staging quite so many of them, or waiting to start them until later in the race.
But Pitney points out another problem: Moderators nowadays are often challenged with much more than simply introducing topics. They’re increasingly tasked with managing outbursts from candidates — and a quick YouTube search turns up tons of videos specifically chronicling just how difficult it is to keep the conversation on track.
Pitney adds that debates would be “more educational” if moderators could focus purely on managing time and topics, but as the clips above illustrate, that’s much easier said than done. Chervinsky says she believes debates are “still useful” — but their only path to sustained relevance is by empowering moderators to better control the conversations by muting people’s microphones if they are not following the rules and fact-checking candidates in real time.
“There should be more of an opportunity for moderators to push back and follow up on answers,” she says. “These are all really important elements in a Democratic discourse.”
