Do Debates Matter?

Should we expect the polls to reflect how bad Trump was in the first debate?

Debates are like vice presidential picks – they probably won’t help you, but they can definitely hurt you.

How can debates help? If you are losing, it can help overcome voter concerns and reinforce presidential impressions which can both help reverse negative public opinion. Although we don’t have a lot of good polling data to support this – debate winners maybe get a bump of a point or two in the polls, and that is probably only true for the first debate most years – it can stop the bleeding. This is helped by media narratives of comebacks and vulnerable candidates who didn’t appear vulnerable before the debate. Think Romney in 2012. He won the first debate, got a small polling bump, and Obama had to deal with days of media suggesting he was going to lose the election. All that ended after the second debate and the polling advantage Romney got from the first debate was fleeting. In the end, Obama won a clear and convincing victory. He was never really in danger of losing, although for a few days after the first debate you wouldn’t know that from listening to the news.

At an Election Night party in Boston in 2012, a reporter asked me if I was worried about the results – which had barely begun coming in at that time. I told her Obama was going to win this election with 303-332 electoral votes, depending on whether or not he wins Florida. “How can you be so sure?” she asked me. “I don’t know any other way of putting this. I am paying attention,” I replied. “So are we [meaning the media]?” “It’s not coming through in your reporting, because there has been no reason to assume Romney was ever going to win this.” “Even after the first debate?” “Yes, even after the first debate.” Later on, after the race was called, she found me and asked, “How did you know?” “Well, I wasn’t sure whether we would win Florida. But, to answer your question: I was paying attention.” I doubt I would now have this kind of a conversation with a reporter on Election Night. Polling has become something political reporters are more familiar with, perhaps because of 2016. But, back then folks thought that race was close right up until it was called, and it never was. This is how much a debate performance can register in the public imagination, even when it makes almost zero difference in the polls.

But, there are times when debate performance can matter to voter preference. And that is usually when a candidate makes a big gaffe that undercuts a candidate’s narrative or reinforces criticisms already extant. Think Ford in 1976 for the former, and Dukakis in 1988 for the latter. Ford’s assertion that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe suggested to the audience that, despite being the incumbent, he was not up to the job. In some ways this reinforced criticisms of him, but those criticisms were usually trivial, as in he was a bit of bumbler and klutz not that he was unfamiliar with cold war politics. What it really did was undermine the foreign policy chops that his administration – inherited from Nixon – had considered a campaign strength next to the one-term governor of Georgia who was his opponent.

Dukakis was already losing to Bush in 1988 when he gave what many at the time thought was a highly technocratic response to a question that should have elicited a more personal and emotional response from the candidate. It solidified a narrative of Dukakis as an out-of-touch elitist, which was impressive considering his opponent was a blue blood Ivy Leaguer who’s father was a senator and who did not know what a supermarket scanner was (which we found out in the 1992 campaign). Dukakis did not start losing the race that night, but there is reason to believe that he lost it for good at that debate.

So, what are we to make of Tuesday’s debate between Biden and Trump? First, I am not sure anyone should be surprised by what happened. We all know the old fable of the turtle and the scorpion crossing the river. Trump is going to be who he is, even if it is a very bad decision for his own personal success. He went into the debate down by at least seven points in the polls. The smart move would have been to play up Biden’s “strengths” as an experienced political debater and show some humility in the lead-up to the debate. At the debate, he should have subverted expectations by not being himself – by listening, following the rules, making overtures to people of color and women, and letting Biden fail to hit the bar that he (Trump) raised during his pre-debate compliments of the former vice president. That’s what he should have done. But, instead, Trump is a scorpion. So, he’ll drown with the turtle rather than do what’s best for him just to show everyone he does him and no one tells him differently. It may have been an intentional play for his base – although I think if there was anything intentional about his behavior it was to get people to stop talking about his tax returns – but that’s just amateur thinking. His base – at least the ones who love it when he is an asshole and want to hear more racist nonsense from him – are not going anywhere. Even if they all get out and vote, the polls show that will not be enough. He cannot win the election with 42% of the national vote. He needs to convince folks who might want to vote for a Republican, but can’t stand him to do so. Behaving like a caricature of himself on national television for ninety minutes is not the way to do that.

There has been some polling data over the past 24 hours that suggests the debate was really bad for Trump. It certainly does not seem to have helped him. But, since he is so far behind right now and people are already voting, it doesn’t matter whether Biden gains from the debate. If the polls don’t change, it means one of two things: (1) debates don’t matter, or (2) the electorate is so stable in their preferences right now nothing will change it. Tomorrow is the weekly polling review, so we’ll look at how the polling is shaping up post-debate. However, it is possible we won’t have a good picture of the impact of the debate on the polling until Monday.