"There’s no way this is real,” I found myself thinking, as I sat in my living room watching the first 2020 Presidential Debate. Onscreen, President Trump and former Vice President Biden stood on opposite ends of the debate stage, yelling over each other like five-year-olds. Trump constantly talked over poor Chris Wallace, the debate moderator, and interrupted Biden mid-point several times. Seemingly at his wit’s end, Biden at one point called Trump “a clown,” then immediately corrected himself. “Excuse me, this person,” he amended.
Though the debate lasted just over an hour and a half, I struggled to glean much information from it on either side’s stances, whether that be because of either side’s unwillingness to answer certain questions, the constant interruptions, or the unending attacks from each side. It felt a little like reality TV, actually: all drama, no substance. Many Americans agree. One commentator, in a letter to the editor for The New York Times, wrote, “The debate on Tuesday night was an embarrassment for the country and for the office of the president.”
My inner Trump-hater yearns to blame the President for the debate fiasco, and while the facts do show that Trump played a much larger role in derailing the debate than Biden did—he interrupted Biden and Wallace at least 128 times as Slate found in a tally—I can see a larger issue at play here. Presidential debates have been steadily going downhill for a long time.
Take a look, for example, at the very first televised presidential debate, held in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. The debate lasted an hour—considerably less than today’s debates—yet still provided ample time for candidates to explain their stances. No interruptions, no fancy, grandiose stage, and much longer allotted speaking times for each candidate: Kennedy and Nixon each had a staggering eight minutes to make their cases in the opening remarks. Seem boring? Maybe, especially taking into account Americans’ shortening attention spans, but back then, the debate attracted a staggering 70 million Americans, around two-thirds of the U.S. adult population, according to National Geographic. Comparatively, only around 22% of the US adult population watched the debate this year, according to CNN.
I don’t, however, find the problem with today’s debates to be the falling of viewership. If anything, this stems from the true problem: the lack of substance in today’s debates. Undecided Americans tune in to the debates to hear from the candidates on topical issues, platforms, and future policy choices, all in order to help determine who they will vote for come November 3rd. With all the interruptions, going over time limits, and fighting, however, it becomes increasingly difficult for viewers to learn anything at all from the candidates--aside from “Trump needs to learn to shut up” and “Biden needs to learn to speak up.”
Even the vice presidential debate between Senator Harris and Vice President Pence on October 7th, though much more mature and orderly, didn’t come without its kinks. The candidates often struggled to finish making points, and reduced complicated questions and situations down to rehearsed-sounding responses that all too often simplified problems, failed to lay out the important details of the platform, and even ignored the moderator’s questions completely. The candidates designed these responses—often chock-full of one-liners—in order to most attract the next day’s headlines, but they could never have foreseen the biggest star of that night’s debate: the fly that, for two minutes, landed on Pence’s head and captivated the nation.
Short of installing a massive mosquito net around either candidate, perhaps we’ll just have to deal with the possibility of flies landing on candidates’ heads for the immediate future. As for the question of substance: candidates should be given more time to answer questions, preferably over two minutes and definitely over the 15 second time limit sometimes given. Such a change will allow candidates to go into more depth in their answers, and perhaps relieve Chris Wallace and future moderators from having to yell at candidates that their time has run out.
Whether or not candidates will actually take advantage of longer answering times or simply squander their precious minutes talking about the honor of being chosen as a candidate (looking at you, Senator Harris) remains to be seen. If a chance exists of fixing the debates and making them truly informative once more, however, I say it’s worth a shot.
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