On Sept. 21, Vice President Kamala Harris officially accepted CNN’s invitation to debate former President Donald Trump for a second time. Should Trump accept, 2024 would be the first election cycle since 2016 to feature more than one debate between the two major party candidates. For some voters, a return to tradition might sound like a forecast for a reset in American politics. For others, the prospect of another nationally televised presidential debate is cause for panic.
Ears might ring with the last decade’s most awkward debate quotables, with Trump’s “They’re eating the dogs” being the newest of the bunch. Even excluding the much-parodied debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump and President Joe Biden’s interruption-filled train wreck in 2020 and Biden’s less-than-stellar performance in 2024 are full of cringeworthy moments better left in the past. Given the recent record, you’d have good reason to be nervous about giving presidential candidates any more airtime. You’d also have good reason to assume that most Americans are tuning out. But they aren’t.
The Sept. 10 ABC debate between Trump and Harris was seen by 67 million people, not accounting for streaming and social media. So why, if we acknowledge the embarrassing moments of modern presidential debates, do we keep tuning in? Well, maybe it’s not so shameful. Perhaps there’s a striking authenticity in the absurdity, a window to important truths within the irreverence.
I believe that, in the end, facts have never been particularly important in the past century’s presidential debates. Take, for example, the 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. It appears that not much is remembered about what either candidate said, but everyone knows that Nixon performed poorly because he seemed nervous while Kennedy appeared collected.
Even in more recent history, the most viral debate quotes have still been decidedly nonpolitical at face value: Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women,” Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again,” Trump’s “nasty woman” and Biden’s “Will you shut up, man?” Debates are seemingly not important or memorable because they get the facts right; they’re important and memorable because they capture the humanity of the people on stage. They goad candidates into showing their true colors and, ultimately, their personality is the story that counts.
There’s something about this reality that is almost more true than facts themselves. In my opinion, we tacitly accept that the presidential debate stage is not the place to fact-check with any effectiveness and simply treat it as theater. And like theater, the facts are never as important as the ways in which they are told. The subtext always yields more meaning than spoken words.
Take Trump’s unlikely success in 2016 as a case study. Despite a sub-thirty percent win probability and widespread agreement about his tendency to bend the truth, Trump won the presidential election, and one of the most cited reasons for the win was his ‘outsider’ attitude. It was, in fact, the very things which he was maligned for — his brashness, his rudeness and his unorthodox criticism of the political establishment — that attracted voters. For a voter disillusioned by the ‘same-old’ political system, Clinton’s over-professionalism contrasted glaringly with Trump’s perhaps refreshing absurdity.
The key takeaway here is not necessarily to become convinced of Donald Trump’s merits, but to understand just how impactful the non-factual, personal parts of presidential debates really are. And since the debate’s dominance is unlikely to be usurped any time soon, anyone — including Vice President Harris — can use this to their advantage. Instead of reverting to professionalism, for example, someone like Kamala Harris might choose to give Trump a taste of his own medicine. Addressing your base, responding to personal attacks and being willing to engage in unorthodox, original thinking are all ways to seem more human and attract voters.
But the benefits of this debate system don’t only accrue to the candidates — they help voters, too. The bedrock of representative democracy is the voter’s trust in their representatives to fight for their interests. If you aren’t familiar with a candidate, you don’t know that you can trust them with such a task. When a candidate is forced to work outside the safe zone of pre-rehearsed rhetoric, they become more genuine. When they appear as real, familiar people, you can better gauge whether they truly represent you. And voting for someone you trust makes you a confident participant in democracy with an amplified voice.
In a world of alternative information and dubious sources, it’s impossible to expect every domain to be equally credible. Expecting such a thing of U.S. presidential debates is an especially fruitless endeavor. Instead, I argue that we have to use them for what they’re worth. As voters, we can consider the interpersonal as well as the political in forming a relationship with a candidate and expanding the sources of our voter information. Given their factually suspicious nature, debates cannot be the sole motivation for one’s choice, but seeing the absurdity for what it is can guarantee a more thoughtful political perspective.
