Are Political Debates Still a Worthwhile Tool to Judge Candidates?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
The 2022 midterm election season has sparked reflection across the spectrum on a mainstay of American politics for the last 60 years– the televised candidate debate. With candidates from both sides of the aisle opting to forgo the live face offs, the efficacy of debates as a tool for candidates to express their position on issues, and for voters to evaluate their ballot options, is in question.
Against Debates: Luke Winkie believes the American electorate is too polarized for debates to be meaningful, writing, “debates are not a conversion tool, and they haven’t been for a long time.” This sentiment was echoed by Matt Lewis, who doubts candidate debates are anything more than media spectacle, contrasting the modern style against the traditional, far-slower paced, Lincoln-Douglas debates, writing, “today’s debates are geared for our short attention span era, where audiences can only (at best) digest sound bites.”
For Debates: John Fund believes the live back-and-forth forces candidates to think on their feet, giving voters a peek behind the curtain of the often heavily-curated political image machine. He writes, “debates have their flaws. But compared to the rest of the messaging that goes on in campaigns they are a Mount Olympus of intellectual content. Let’s shame candidates into having more of them.”
For Context: The Republican National Convention voted in April to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, claiming the group was biased towards Democratic candidates.
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Voters used to be able to count on debates to insert some policy discussion fiber into campaigns that were often filled with feel-good TV ads and stunts, the equivalent of campaign junk food.
But debates are slowly fading away, the victim of our polarized politics and the belief of many campaign consultants that turning out their respective party’s base is all that matters.
A Brookings Institute study reports that as recently as 2010, the five most competitive Senate races had SEVENTEEN debates. This year there will be only seven, and...
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Wednesday night’s U.S. Senate debate in Pennsylvania raised even more concerns regarding John Fetterman’s health and fitness for office, but it also raised questions about the way we judge candidates.
Are political debates still a worthwhile exercise that give voters a better sense of the candidates and their policies, or are they a low-budget game show that rewards the best entertainer? Whatever the answer, the notion that debates are a sacrosanct part of American democracy is fading, and the candidates are voting with their feet.
In 2016, Donald Trump seemed...
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I didn’t even know Marco Rubio was taking his re-election efforts seriously until this past Tuesday, when the senator stood for a debate against Val Demings—the Democratic congresswoman from central Florida who is trying to take his seat. The polling in the race has Rubio with a comfortable, if not insurmountable lead; consistently about four or five percentage points ahead. Rubio is certainly close to being in the clear, but if you were only analyzing the race by the temperment of the debate highlights that poured through my timeline during the...
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