Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Puncturing the Hype Around Debates

With all the increasing attention that debates are getting as our politics becomes nationalized and social media-driven, their actual substantive value to citizens remains dubious. In my latest column for Bloomberg Opinion, I lament the way debates are covered in the media and conclude that we're actually much better off if elections aren't decided on the basis of candidates' debate performances.

There Will Probably Be Presidential Debates in the Future...But It's OK If There Aren't

News broke on Thursday that the Republican National Committee was threatening to require its future presidential nominees to pledge to boycott general election debates organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has produced the debates every four years since it was formed by representatives of both major parties prior to the 1988 election. This threat, conveyed in a letter to the debate commission from RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, is being made amidst a set of demands for changes to the commission's membership and policies (the complete letter is available here). Republican dissatisfaction with the debate organizers has been apparent since at least 2016, and is in some ways a manifestation of the Trump-era party's larger suspicion of political institutions that are not under its direct control.

It's possible that this means there will be no fall debates in 2024 for the first time since the 1972 election. But we're still far from that point—despite some headlines suggesting otherwise—for a number of reasons.

First, the RNC is making demands that, in principle, the debate commission could find a way to satisfy, including an earlier start to the debate schedule, term limits on commission members, and public neutrality of commission members toward the candidates. The commission will be understandably reluctant to look like it's acquiescing to threats from one of the parties; on the other hand, in the end it would rather hold debates than not hold them. Nothing in McDaniel's letter looks like an ultimatum that would be impossible for the commission to address in some form.

Second, the parties lack control over the presidential nominees once they have been formally selected at the national conventions. Party organizations can require all kinds of signed pledges or commitments from candidates, but they lose the ability to enforce them once the nomination is granted. (If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2024, and then decides he wants to attend the fall debates, would he let a previous pledge to the RNC stop him?) Responding to McDaniel, debate commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf—himself a former RNC chair—noted that the commission communicates and negotiates directly with the campaigns themselves, not the national parties: "we don't deal with the political parties [and] never have . . . we work only with those candidates for president and vice president who meet the criteria" for participation.

Finally, winning the presidency is the primary purpose of the national party committees, and has been since these committees were formed in the 1800s. Once the national ticket is selected, parties pursue this goal by becoming the loyal agents of their candidates. If participating in a debate boosts the campaign's chance of victory—perhaps the nominee is running behind in the polls and needs an opportunity to shake up the race—it would be entirely out of character, as well as an act of political malpractice, for the party to attempt to deny the candidate such a strategic option or to publicly criticize him or her for taking it.

This post is not intended to be an expression of reassurance. Honest Graft is a long-standing source of skepticism questioning the value of televised debates, swimming against an endless tide of debate-hyping voices in the news media who insist on treating as sacred civic rituals a series of events that have seldom proven edifying or substantively valuable in practice. If no debates occur in 2024 because the RNC, the debate commission, and the Republican nominee all choose inflexibility over compromise, American politics will not suffer. But—for better, or maybe for worse—we're still a long way from that point right now.

Second Presidential Debate Recap: At Long Last, a Conventional Partisan Fight

Thursday's event was the fifth general election debate of Donald Trump's political career. It was, by far, the most ordinary of the five.

Yes, there were some of the usual uniquely Trumpian flourishes—the factual hyperbole, the sarcastic mockery of the opposition, the dubious stories of people being moved to tears in his presence. But the relative lack of interruptions and constant cross-talk this time around exposed the familiarity of the actual substantive terrain over which the candidates fought.

Joe Biden acted very much like a typical Democrat. He came to the debate armed with summaries of specific policy proposals to address specific social problems, along with associated facts and figures: a public option for health care, a climate change bill, an immigration reform initiative. He pledged to protect the interests of specific groups within the Democratic coalition, such as labor unions, African-Americans, and the "middle class" more generally.

Trump, for his part, exercised the usual Republican counterstrategy against such an approach. He conceded ground on many of the specific policies, and even tried to outflank Biden at times (as on criminal justice). At times, his attacks did not target the content of Biden's proposals at all, but instead cited Biden's lack of success at achieving them while he was in office. 

But Trump also described Biden's agenda in a more general sense as ideologically radical, associating Biden with left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He warned that Biden's election would threaten the future of America as we know it. And he repeatedly cited various stories and claims that circulate in the conservative media but are less well-known outside its regular consumer base.

That Joe Biden is a walking personification of his party is hardly news. But beneath the idiosyncratic exterior, Donald Trump has himself become an increasingly orthodox Republican over the course of his time in politics. In both his rhetoric and his substantive positions, Trump hews more closely to party doctrine today than he did in 2016, and his instincts in the heat of the debate reflect this evolution.

Many media commentators opined afterwards that the debate didn't break any new ground. That's a reasonable characterization. But one big reason why is that each candidate adopted the traditional playbook of his own partisan team, playing to its perennial strengths and defending against its weaknesses. In a year stuffed with unprecedented developments, it was a rare moment of political conventionality.

Vice Presidential Debate Recap: Nothing Interesting Happened...Thankfully

The vice presidential debate Wednesday night between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris was such a crucial ritual of American democracy—so precious to our electoral process that it had to be held in person despite an active national epidemic—that many leading figures in American journalism found their attention repeatedly distracted by a fly that landed on Pence's head partway through the evening.

Both participants are classic pols with well-crafted classic pol personas that don't compel them to answer questions they don't find it advisable to answer, and the vice presidential debate is always a slightly unnatural format because it mostly involves attacking or defending two other people who aren't in the room. The relative discipline and polish of both Pence and Harris compared to this year's presidential nominees makes it easier for the strategic calculations of both campaigns to come through: Democrats want the election to turn on COVID-19 and health care, while Republicans would rather talk about China and the Green New Deal.

The lower rhetorical temperature compared to last week's presidential faceoff was nominally praised by commentators, but the consensus media judgment that "no minds would be changed" as a result, as well as the fixation on the fly, betrayed a certain general boredom with the proceedings. But because debates are a lousy basis on which to choose a candidate—especially vice presidential debates—this was actually a good sign. There's really nothing wrong with a boring debate, after all. There are worse things in politics than prosaic adequacy.

First Presidential Debate Recap: What Was Said Is Still More Important Than How It Was Said

As a long-confirmed debate skeptic who was thoroughly unsurprised by what happened Tuesday night, I must admit to feeling a bit amused by the theatrically offended responses of major media personalities, whose (normally ample) faith in the civic value of debates was suddenly shaken to the point of wondering whether there would, or should, be a second or third event this year. Nothing that President Trump did or said was any different from what he has done or said in countless press conferences, interviews, and Twitter communications since he became a political figure. But for some reason this thoroughly characteristic behavior is deemed to be a more serious threat to the health of the polity when it occurs on the sacred debate stage than in any other public forum.

I, too, would welcome a calmer and more respectful exchange of ideas conducted with scrupulous adherence to the mutually negotiated ground rules. In the end, though, it's a mistake to focus too much on issues of personal demeanor at the expense of rhetorical substance—how something was said, rather than what was said. Who interrupted whom is not terribly important at a time when the nation is facing multiple simultaneous crises, and when the legitimacy of the election itself is among the topics openly contested by the candidates.

There was a time when Trump was treated as the most fascinatingly spontaneous figure in politics. Compared to other politicians, he certainly seemed that way at first—all the ad libs and digressions and heterodoxies and he-didn't-just-say-that-did-he transgressiveness made him stand out from the scripted, handled pack. But after years and years of the same approach, same arguments, and same obsessions, he's actually become remarkably predictable; the bag of tricks has turned out to be smaller than it looked. Other presidents who have suffered poorly-received debate performances have shown the ability to learn, to adapt, to change their strategic course. But there's little reason to expect anything but more of the same in the next two debates, which leaves the Trump campaign mostly where it was before tonight: hoping that their current opponent somehow becomes just as divisive as their last one.

If We Must Have Debates, Let's at Least Make Them Smarter

The closest that this blog comes to a pose of assertive contrarianism is its consistently dismissive attitude toward the staging of televised debates in presidential campaigns. Debates are a well-established quadrennial tradition that are often treated as sacred rites of civic virtue; self-righteous outrage predictably ensues upon any suggestion that a candidate might or should refuse to participate. The political world is filled with people who are invested in puffing up debates, many of whom were no doubt captains of their high school debate teams. But there's a pretty strong case that their actual value to the democratic process is often zero and sometimes negative. 

There are two main problems with debates. First, they are framed in advance as valuable exercises in political deliberation and public edification even though they are actually treated as a form of entertainment and as one more arena of partisan competition. Second, the media commentators whose interpretations affect public perceptions of the outcome often decide who "won" and who "lost" on fairly silly grounds. Cracking a pre-written joke, sighing into a microphone, having too much on-camera energy or not enough—are these really the moments upon which the leadership of the nation should properly turn?

If debates are here to stay, which they are at least until a future candidate is bold enough to boycott them, they could at least be smartened up a bit. Here are three specific areas that could badly use improvement:

1. Before the debates: ignore campaign spin. 

When it comes to debates, media commentators not only admit to being influenced by campaign spin, but even judge the performance of the candidates against the prior claims of their opponents. For this reason, the Trump campaign's repeated attacks on Biden as mentally enfeebled—often accompanied by suggestions that the debates will dramatically expose his incompetence—strike some analysts as a serious strategic error that will make it easy for the media to declare Biden the winner. Since Trump has suggested that Biden can't make it through a 90-minute live event without embarrassing himself, or at least without the use of surreptitious pharmacological assistance, he has presumably set a very low bar for his opponent to clear.

Maybe Trump didn't play the spin game well. So what? There's no good reason why independent observers' judgments about debate performance should be shaped by whatever the nominees or their flacks say beforehand. (And note the recent Washington Post story quoting anonymous Democratic sources trying to lower expectations in their own way by claiming to worry about Biden losing his temper in response to Trump's provocations.) The excessive importance of prior "expectations" means that debate participants are often not compared with each other, but are judged instead against the caricatures of themselves that already exist in the minds of media analysts. Indeed, if Trump were simply to behave 30 percent less combatively than normal tomorrow night, he would earn some of the best press coverage of his entire presidency even if his performance were otherwise unmemorable.

2. During the debates: ask questions designed to illuminate important subjects for voters, not just play gotcha with candidates.

Debate moderators sometimes fall into the practice of choosing what they think of as "tough" questions: questions that try to catch a candidate in some kind of exaggeration or hypocrisy, or that effectively restate whatever attacks the opposition is making at the time. There is a place for such questions. But they seldom produce interesting responses, in part because candidates anticipate them and rehearse a deflection, and the debate can easily become stuck on a topic that doesn't ultimately have much to do with the job the participants are seeking.

Intended "gotcha" questions should be better balanced with more open-ended, less overtly antagonistic questions that invite candidates to envision the future as well as defend their past, and that focus as much as possible on the presidency's actual powers—which are more expansive in the realms of foreign policy and public administration than in the well-trod ground of legislator-in-chief—as well as its limitations. If debates are to be a kind of public job interview in which the audience actually learns something about the applicants that is relevant to their potential future responsibilities, the questions need to reflect what the job actually is. And any "fun" or "unconventional" question—"what do you do to relax?" or "can you say something nice about your opponent?"—is always an insulting waste of time, a smarmy condescension to Middle America in the guise of artificial folksiness. (Whenever regular citizens have the opportunity to address presidential candidates, they nearly always ask questions that are serious and policy-focused.)

3. After the debates: coverage should focus on what was said, not how it was said.

The history of debates is strewn with supposed candidate gaffes, but very few of those identified by media critics involve truly troubling mistakes—the misstatement of an important fact, the outright smear of an opponent, an insensitive remark directed towards a social group. From Richard Nixon's physical appearance to Mitt Romney's inelegantly-phrased description of his governorship's female staff recruitment efforts, nearly all of the best-remembered debate "blunders" over the years remain firmly at the who-really-cares level of substantive importance. Even the ability of a candidate to recover from a "bad" performance in one debate with a "good" showing a week or two later, as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all did in their re-election campaigns, merely proves how unreliable it can be to judge potential presidents based on their personal demeanor in any particular circumstance. Besides, we already know plenty about what kinds of people these candidates are. Let's focus on what they say they will do.

Democratic Debate Review: A Telling Final Question

The news media didn't take very long Wednesday night to settle on a consensus interpretation of the evening's Democratic presidential debate. Before the first commercial break had been reached, the conventional wisdom had already swept across Twitter: the evening was a victory for Elizabeth Warren and a defeat for Michael Bloomberg. There were reasons to expect such a storyline even before Warren used her first statement of the debate to launch a direct attack on Bloomberg: the press has been stung all week by accusations that it hasn't been granting Warren the attention she deserves, and Bloomberg, who has has been looming over the race for months but hasn't yet competed for votes or participated in any debates, was facing the difficult task of living up in person to a set of rising poll numbers fueled by an unprecedented advertising blitz.

Whether Bloomberg experiences a serious popularity reversal as a result of the night's events is difficult to predict. He's likely to suffer negative news coverage over the next few days, but he doesn't have to worry about his funding sources drying up, and it's not clear that the specific subject that was the main source of contention at the debate—the use of non-disclosure agreements by former employees of his media company—will resonate strongly with the segment of the Democratic mass electorate otherwise open to supporting his candidacy. Warren can count on a temporary boost in positive publicity and fundraising, but with two early states that should have been relatively favorable ground already behind her and a much less friendly geographic path laying immediately ahead, she probably needs more than one strong debate to remain in serious contention.

All this is pretty good news for current front-runner Bernie Sanders, who mostly escaped attacks from the rest of the field on Wednesday and who has the least of all the candidates to fear from a continued media focus on Bloomberg. (The biggest threat to Sanders would be a resurgent Joe Biden, but while many media observers thought Biden's performance was stronger than usual on Wednesday, it won't be the major story coming out of the debate.) In fact, the final question of the night revealed the strength of Sanders's position: he was the only candidate to agree that if no single candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates, the candidate with the most delegates should receive the nomination.

This is, of course, partially the Sanders campaign's recognition that he is unlikely to be a compromise choice or the preferred nominee of Democratic superdelegates in the event of a contested convention. But it's also a signal to the party made from a position of strength. The Sanders camp is betting that there's a good chance that they will have at least a delegate plurality, and they want to warn Democratic leaders at this early stage that they will denounce any attempt to deny him the nomination under such circumstances as an illegitimate usurpation of the process.

The fact that the rest of the Democratic field responded to the question by defending the right of the party to select a different nominee reflects the extent to which contestation rather than an outright delegate majority is, in their minds, a live possibility even with 48 states and 7 territories still to vote in this race. Of course, we can expect any of them to make the same argument that Sanders is currently making if they wind up with a delegate plurality instead. But more than a third of the total national delegate count will be selected within the next two weeks, and it's quite possible that we're not very far away from a situation where a contested convention is the only numerically plausible alternative to a first-ballot Sanders nomination. With such a front-loaded nomination calendar, it gets late early out there.

Democratic Debate Review: If Klobuchar "Won," Sanders Actually Won

Friday night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire mostly rehashed the participants' past arguments and rhetorical styles, and it didn't generate a dramatic candidate confrontation or meltdown despite repeated attempts by the moderators to incite conflict or trap a candidate in a "gotcha" moment. Amy Klobuchar seems to have been anointed the winner by prevailing news media sentiment, but this evaluation was based more on the perception of a series of fluid, well-crafted remarks rather than a killer moment destined to be frequently replayed on cable news or spread widely on social media.

Most likely, that means the evening's proceedings won't have much of an influence on the polls. A debate's impact on the horse race tends to be maximized when it generates a single attention-grabbing segment, and only one of the seven previous debates this election appeared to produce a clear subsequent shift in candidate support: the first debate last June, when Kamala Harris attracted widespread publicity for challenging Joe Biden over his school busing positions in the 1970s. It's hard to think of many past examples of a candidate who gained a significant post-debate bounce based on a general media judgment that he or she just "did the best" over the course of the evening.

But if Klobuchar indeed gets a popularity boost in the final days before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, it's most likely to work to the ultimate strategic advantage of one of her opponents—in particular, Bernie Sanders. As a conventionally partisan center-left woman, Klobuchar's profile overlaps less with Sanders than with any other major candidate in the race. A last-second Klobuchar surge could deal major blows to Pete Buttigieg (by potentially denying him a valuable victory in New Hampshire) and/or Joe Biden (by relegating him to a fourth- or even fifth-place finish in the state), who at this stage must be considered Sanders's two main rivals for the Democratic nomination.

Sanders didn't seem to get much credit from the media for his performance in Iowa; the press had expected him to win, weighed Buttigieg's apparent narrow edge in the state delegate count much more heavily than Sanders's larger margin in the raw vote totals, and was enticed by the novelty of the Mayor Pete phenomenon. But the damage that Iowa inflicted on Biden's campaign arguably left Sanders in the best position of any candidate in the race at the moment. At the very least, Sanders is currently likely to finish either first or second in each of the first three early states, he has what appears to be the best-funded and best-organized national campaign (not counting the untested Bloomberg operation, which is hamstrung by its risky "wait until March" strategy), and he would benefit the most from a prolonged multi-candidate race in which two or more non-insurgent opponents jockeyed with each other for support.

Of course, the outcome is still unclear. Today's polls suggest that Sanders is in danger of losing New Hampshire to Buttigieg, which the press would interpret as a serious setback considering his 22-point victory there in 2016, and Biden could yet rebound if he can manage to survive until the race moves to the friendlier terrain of South Carolina. But without much reason to believe that Klobuchar has more than a minimal chance of launching herself into actual contention for the nomination at this stage, any temporary good fortune for her is probably even better news for Bernie.

November Democratic Debate Recap: Lovefest or Snoozefest?

The Democratic debate Wednesday night was mostly devoid of sharp exchanges between candidates, with the partial exception of a few moments involving also-ran Tulsi Gabbard. To some observers, it was a pleasant and substantive affair; to others—especially reporters searching for a headline—it was a boring anticlimax to a long day dominated by the impeachment hearings in Washington.

The amicable climate was partially due to the MSNBC moderators, who mostly declined to ask questions intended to provoke conflict between specific candidates. Some corners of lefty Twitter credited this dynamic to the fact that all four moderators were women. But female moderators in previous debates have not been reluctant to set candidates against each other; a more likely explanation lies in MSNBC's own house style (personified by Rachel Maddow, the network's biggest star), which sells itself as floating cerebrally above anything that smacks of a mere made-for-TV stunt. Most candidates may also see attacks in a large field as strategically risky unless they can be directed at an easy target like Gabbard.

Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg are all doing well enough in the polls—whether in Iowa, nationally, or both—that debate performances aren't critical for their candidacies at this stage in the race (pundits never seem to think Biden does well in these events, but it doesn't seem to be hurting him with voters), and Gabbard, Yang, and Steyer aren't serious contenders for the nomination. That leaves Harris, Booker, and Klobuchar in the position of needing some kind of breakthrough as the days tick down, and all three seemed to have prepared for Wednesday's debate with an eye toward making a memorable impression with viewers. Notably, each of them made an explicit strategic case for themselves as nominees.

The problem is that they are all, to an extent, in competition with each other to attract media and activist attention during a crucial pre-Iowa stretch in which impeachment, not the Democratic primary race, will be the chief national political story. Journalists will probably agree that they all performed well, but none of them is likely to gain the kind of post-debate bounce that Harris got over the summer but couldn't sustain thereafter. For all three, their best path to the nomination remains a better-than-expected showing in Iowa that carries into the succeeding states. But while it's still early, it's not as early as it used to be, and their hopes increasingly depend on a major stumble by one or more of the front-runners.

October Democratic Debate Recap: What Purpose Do Debates Serve?

Tuesday night's Democratic debate fell into a familiar pattern: a discussion of the relative merits of single-payer health care vs. a public option early in the evening, a few awkward exchanges thereafter but no single revealing moment, and a silly closing question that inadvertently revealed the extent to which television anchors tend to regard their viewers as simple-minded and allergic to substance. Anyone who hasn't already been paying attention to the race could glean some information from the dynamics on display: Warren and Sanders are running as transformational idealists; Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are running as art-of-the-possible realists; and Harris, Booker, and Castro are trying to split the difference. Warren was the target of criticism from multiple rivals (though, interestingly, not from Sanders), reflecting her status as a candidate on the rise in the polls.

But most of the audience tuning in for a three-hour debate held more than three months before the start of the primary season presumably knew most of this information already, or would have gathered it soon enough from other sources. Despite all the hype that debates receive—and despite the power that the qualification rules now hold over candidate behavior, especially fundraising strategies—the value that they actually add to the nomination process remains very difficult to determine. (I suspect that their net effect in general is somewhat negative, increasing the chance that the election is affected by non-substantive "zingers" and "blunders" while attracting an excessively large field of also-ran candidates seeking national publicity.)

Maybe the solution is to have fewer debates. But, at the minimum, expectations for their newsworthiness should be lowered to an appropriate level—especially in this election. With so many candidates in the race, it is hard for any single contender to receive enough camera time to make a strong impression or create a dramatic moment. And a multi-candidate election also scrambles the strategic picture considerably: attack one opponent, and another rival might wind up benefiting more than you do.

After every debate, complaints pile up at the feet of the moderators or the sponsoring media outlet: it was boring, the questions were bad, important topics were ignored, this or that candidate got too much or too little attention. Some of these points are always valid. But when debate after debate fails to enlighten, perhaps the flaw is in the institution itself, or in the anticipation that precedes it. Presidential candidates always differ in important ways that an informed electorate should consider before making its choices. But there's no reason to assume that debates, at least as they are currently organized, do much to educate voters about these differences.

Democratic Debate Analysis: Who Has the Right to Question Biden's Competence?

It's likely that even those analysts who love to declare winners, losers, and game-changing moments (a practice largely eschewed here at Honest Graft) won't find all that much fodder in Thursday night's Democratic debate. The biggest pre-debate media hype focused on the opportunity for a dramatic personal showdown between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who were appearing on the same debate stage for the first time this year. But no major conflict arose between the two, and for sound strategic reasons. Biden is still ahead in the race, while Warren seems to be steadily gaining support, and so neither candidate has much incentive to rock the boat—at least not right now. Aiming a sharp personal attack at the other might only backfire among the large share of Democratic voters who have positive views of both candidates.

Even those contenders who are far behind in the polls, and thus have more reason to adopt a risky, attention-grabbing debate style, mostly played nice—at least with each other. (Some mockery lobbed in Donald Trump's direction, especially by Kamala Harris, was seemingly designed not only to play to the crowd but also to potentially bait the president into responding on Twitter.) The biggest exception was Julián Castro, who directly challenged Biden on at least two occasions. Castro provoked the most comment during an exchange on the subject of health care, when he claimed that Biden had contradicted himself about an aspect of his reform proposal. "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?" Castro asked Biden.

Anyone paying even modest attention to the news coverage of the 2020 Democratic nomination race is likely to have encountered the implication from multiple corners of the national press corps that the front-running former vice president is not operating at peak performance these days. Biden has long been treated by many reporters, fairly or not, as an undisciplined speaker with an unremarkable intellect, but something of a collective judgment has formed that even by his own standards he's lost a step or two, mentally speaking, as he approaches his late 70s. When combined with Biden's digital illiteracy and propensity to tell stories about the mostly-forgotten senators he served with 45 years ago, this has led to an unmistakable theme running through reporters' coverage of Biden that their subject is a man whose time has come and gone—a pattern that Biden's own orbit recently complained about to Ryan Lizza of Politico.

One might think that the potential competence of would-be presidents would be a critical topic for primary voters to consider—or, at the least, fair game to contest in a debate. But from the perspective of a rival candidate, it's a very tricky issue to raise. And Castro missed the mark: his accusations that Biden had misstated, or "forgotten," his own health care plan were simply not true.

Candidates who make false attacks on their opponents are being unfair and deserve criticism. But multiple media assessments faulted Castro not only for making a false attack—something that has been known to happen from time to time in debates—but also for engaging in underhanded if not offensive insinuations about Biden's cognitive acuity: a "low blow," "playing the age card." Yet later in the debate, Biden gave a somewhat meandering answer in response to a question about Afghanistan and made a non sequitur remark about "having the record player on at night" as (apparently) a suggested means for parents to improve the verbal skills of underprivileged children. Both of these comments provoked immediate media mockery in the familiar "Uncle Joe is losing it!" genre that has become a staple of campaign coverage this year.

One need not agree with Castro's specific line of attack—which was clearly erroneous on the facts—to wonder whether the national media are in danger of adopting a kind of double standard under which reporters and commentators can openly ridicule Biden's outdated references and freely speculate about potential senility while simultaneously pronouncing any political competitor who suggests the same to be guilty of ageism or other out-of-bounds transgressions. This is a complicated and delicate subject, and no clear rule book applies. But if journalists are as concerned about Biden's fitness to serve as they appear to be, they should allow the issue of competence to be openly litigated during the nomination campaign. It's an important attribute for a president to have, and voters should be allowed—and even encouraged—to take it very seriously.

Democratic Debate Analysis (Second Night): Can Anyone Beat Biden But Biden?

Some takeaways from Part 2 of this week's Democratic presidential debates (my analysis of Part 1, as well as more general thoughts on debates, can be found here):

1. Joe Biden was the biggest target of attacks on Wednesday—unsurprisingly so, given his current status as the leading candidate in the race. And nearly all of the attacks were ideological jabs from the left: Castro and de Blasio on immigration, Gillibrand and Harris on women's rights, Gabbard on Iraq. What's not yet clear is how vulnerable Biden is to such criticisms; his frequent deployment of his service under Barack Obama as a defense shield in these situations prompted a frustrated response from Booker but may well turn out to be a perfectly effective strategy given Obama's continued popularity with the Democratic electorate. One important question that the debate raises is whether there is an argument that another Democratic candidate can make that's strong enough to bring Biden down, or whether Biden is ultimately much more vulnerable to self-inflicted wounds such as gaffes, or quiet concerns about his age, than open attacks from rivals.

2. One strategic implication of the "lanes" model of party nominations is that it can be advantageous for candidates to attack competitors who are the most ideologically, demographically, or stylistically similar to themselves, on the theory that they are competing over the same blocs of voters. But we haven't seen much evidence yet that Democrats are thinking this way. No Sanders vs. Warren, Buttigieg vs. O'Rourke, Harris vs. Booker, or Biden vs. Bennet showdowns erupted in either debate this week. This was partially due to CNN's transparent maneuvering on both nights to stoke cross-ideological conflict, but no candidates seemed particularly interested in challenging this network-imposed dynamic.

3. Underlying much of the discussion on both nights of the debate is a divide within the Democratic Party over the proper interpretation of the 2016 Clinton-Sanders race and the subsequent rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and company. Do these recent elections demonstrate that a majority of the Democratic Party continues to prefer Obama-style incrementalist politics? Or, instead, do they reflect a growing pressure at the party roots for transformative social change?

Democratic Debate Analysis (First Night): CNN Decides What the Race Is About

Honest Graft was on vacation during the first pair of Democratic presidential debates last month, so this week's events are the first of the 2020 campaign that will receive recaps here on the blog. Perhaps it's worthwhile, then, to review my general perspective on debates before proceeding to discuss Tuesday night's proceedings.

• I tend to be skeptical of analysts' confident declarations of debate "winners" and "losers," because the standards by which such pronouncements are made are usually unclear and are often colored by previous preferences. However, a strong collective judgment among media figures about who did well or who committed a major gaffe can affect candidates' fortunes in important ways, regardless of the fairness of such evaluations.

• Debates can tell us important things beyond who won or lost. They help illustrate candidate strategy, internal party trends and developments, and media preoccupations. But most debates don't turn out to be dramatic "game-changers" in the race as a whole.

• As tools for voters to learn about candidates and make decisions about whom to support, debates are not entirely useless—but neither are they reliably helpful. Rather than adopting the common media theme that debates are sacred exercises in civic enlightenment, citizens should treat them more like the television productions that they are at heart. Television can be entertaining, but it's not reliably informative.

Now, on to a few takeaways from the first night's debate:

1. There was a chance that the random assignment of Sanders and Warren to the same debate stage this month would lead to a showdown between them, but that didn't happen. Instead, the most common dynamic was one in which both candidates were lumped in together as targets of criticism from more moderate rivals.

2. This dynamic didn't just naturally happen on its own; it was largely the consequence of CNN's choice of questions. The moderators, who displayed a curiously hostile tone throughout the evening, were clearly most interested in defining the race as a battle between ideological purity and electoral formidability—a frame to which they frequently returned. (CNN's post-debate coverage summarized the event by repeatedly displaying the chyron "Breaking News: Liberal and Moderate Democrats Clash in Detroit.") The moderators' behavior had the inevitable effect of minimizing the differences between Sanders and Warren, while making the two of them stand out dramatically from the rest of the field.

3. John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, and John Hickenlooper all repeatedly accepted the moderators' invitations to make attacks against Warren and Sanders, but the short response times imposed by CNN (as low as 15 seconds in some cases) meant that these candidates didn't have as much of a chance to explain what made them, personally, the best alternative to the two leading lefties in the race. There's a long historical tradition of Democratic candidates distancing themselves from the left edge of their party—and convincing the Democratic electorate that they are smartly positioning themselves for the general election by doing so. But previous Democrats who have successfully employed this approach en route to the nomination have had some other quality that could excite the party's voters: impressive biography, youthful charisma, policy wonkery. Without an immediately obvious personal selling point, these candidates need to make a positive case for themselves as well, but the format was not well-suited to this objective.

4. Amy Klobuchar, interestingly, didn't really take the opportunity to join in the push against the left, despite her self-positioning as an electable midwesterner. (She preferred the popular moderate tactic of attacking the other party instead.) Klobuchar seems to be doing just well enough in polls and donations to qualify for the next debate in September, so she's not in imminent danger of being culled from the race, but as the resident of a neighboring state she'll need to make a big splash in Iowa or she'll be written off before the New Hampshire primary.

5. After (mostly) uniting around the ACA, the presidential wing of the Democratic Party is splintering again on the issue of health care, with substantive policy differences among candidates sometimes illustrated, and sometimes confusingly obscured, by the invocation of phrases like "Medicare for All." Whether or not Democratic primary voters consciously base their choice of candidate on the issue, the 2020 nomination contest will determine whether the party enters the general election on a platform of advocating the wholesale restructuring of the American health insurance system. A vote for Sanders or Warren as nominee is partially a bet that such a position is now viable in a national race.

Once Again, the Debates Are Going to Cause the DNC Plenty of Grief

The Democratic National Committee faced a lot of criticism for the way it organized presidential nomination debates in 2016. Originally, the party only planned six debates (there ended up being nine), and the first event wasn't held until mid-October 2015—in contrast to the Republicans, who held a total of twelve debates beginning in early August. One of the Democratic debates was held on the Saturday before Christmas, and another occurred over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in January 2016. The Bernie Sanders campaign suspected that the DNC had intentionally scheduled the debates in order to minimize their likely viewership—and, not coincidentally, to deprive Sanders of a large audience for his challenge to the better-known front-runner Hillary Clinton. Complaints about the debates thus became part of the larger case that Sanders supporters built against the DNC for "rigging" the nomination process in Clinton's favor.

Desperate to preserve its popular legitimacy and prove its dedication to equality and inclusion, the DNC changed its ways in advance of the 2020 election. There would be twelve debates in all, and the first event would be held much earlier—in the last week of June 2019. And, importantly, the standards for inclusion in the June and July debates would be very forgiving, in order to forestall accusations that the party was being exclusionary or manipulative: candidates would need only to reach 1 percent in three polls of Democratic voters or to attract 65,000 financial donors. If there were too many candidates to fit in a single debate, the party wouldn't consign secondary candidates to a separate, lower-status "undercard" or "kiddie table" debate, as the Republicans did in 2016. Instead, each candidate would be assigned to one of two consecutive nights via a random draw, stratified in order to ensure that the top contenders in the polls didn't all happen to wind up on the same stage.

But as so often happens in life, maneuvering to address one set of problems can create a new, different set of problems—with no guarantee that the original set will indeed be solved. The scheduling of very early debates with modest eligibility requirements turned out to be something of an attractive nuisance, helping to draw into the race a record-breaking flotilla of candidates enticed by the prospect of national television exposure. With ten candidates participating in each of two 2-hour debates, it's likely that each individual candidate won't get much of a chance to make his or her case to the voters even as a lot of camera time will collectively be consumed by contenders with little or no chance of winning the nomination.

Acknowledging these inconvenient consequences of its own policies, the DNC has indicated that the inclusion criteria will become more stringent beginning with the third debate in September, requiring candidates to reach 2 percent in at least four polls and to receive financial support from at least 130,000 donors. But if a higher threshold succeeds in solving the problem of a debate stage too crowded with also-rans, it will simultaneously exacerbate the older problem of a party perceived to be favoring some candidates over others. Montana governor Steve Bullock is already complaining that his exclusion from next week's debates means that the party isn't hearing "different voices," and it's very possible that the DNC-is-silencing-me caucus could expand by the fall to include multiple sitting senators whose campaigns have yet to catch on with the public.

Maybe nobody will care much that candidates with little popular support aren't invited to future debates. But internal party warfare tends to attract substantial media attention, and frequent complaints from journalists that there are too many Democrats running for president hardly guarantee that they will come to the party's defense when it acts to further limit the number of debate participants. Voters could easily form a vague impression that something about the process was unfair without necessarily supporting, or even recognizing, any of the excluded candidates.

Media figures also love to hype debates in advance, even though they often turn out to be bored in practice by the rehearsed rhetoric and awkward one-liners that usually dominate the proceedings. Anything that dampens anticipatory excitement, then, tends to provoke a fair amount of journalistic grousing. The DNC attempted to ensure that the top candidates were evenly divided between the two debate events next week—but because it defined "top" as polling at only 2 percent or higher, it wound up assigning four of the five leading candidates to a single debate group. Even worse for media critics, the one candidate left out (Elizabeth Warren) is the trendiest at the moment, depriving pundits of the juicy prospect of potential Warren vs. Biden or Warren vs. Sanders in-person showdowns. Journalists responded to the announcement of the debate lineups last Friday with considerable disappointment on social media, despite the DNC's hopes of using the process to demonstrate its scrupulous devotion to fairness and equality.

The centrality of debates in presidential nomination politics is a fairly recent development; the 2012 Republican race is arguably the first nomination contest in which debates played a major role in influencing the dynamics. With their interests increasingly at stake in these events, parties have understandably responded by asserting more control over their production. But the Democratic Party in particular is also extremely sensitive to accusations that any new rules imposed on the process infringe on the sacred right of "the people" to choose a nominee without the stain of elite interference. The DNC is attempting to thread its way through the narrow straits separating excessive chaos from excessive order, but it seems unlikely to do so without attracting simultaneous criticism that it is being both too strict and too indulgent. When it comes to presidential nominations, it's impossible to satisfy everybody—and easy to satisfy nobody.

In Fox Debate Flap, the Press Defends Its Power to Pick Presidents

It is widely accepted in most democracies that party leaders have a right to control the process of nominating candidates for elective office. Here in the United States, however, this proposition is not merely controversial but downright unpopular.

Even the hint that superdelegates might exercise their voting rights under party rules to support a candidate other than the narrow leader in the pledged delegate count provoked accusations in both the 2008 and 2016 Democratic presidential nomination contests that insiders had "rigged" the system in order to silence the voice of the people. These complaints forced a chastened Democratic National Committee to enact limits to superdelegate power in order to protect its popular legitimacy. Republican politicians in 2016 similarly looked on helplessly as voters delivered the nomination to a candidate whom many believed at the time to be a generationally disastrous standard-bearer for their party. Despite this broadly-shared judgment, attempts to force an alternative outcome at the national convention had little energy and soon fizzled out entirely.

But it's too simplistic to view struggles over control of nominations as only pitting party bosses against regular citizens. As critics like Nelson W. Polsby observed decades ago, the post-1968 reforms that created the modern presidential nominating process actually transferred crucial influence from one set of elites—state party organizations—to another set—the news media. Because voters in party primaries habitually act with limited information and weak preferences, especially when the field expands to three or more contenders, they can be decisively swayed by the volume and tone of press attention devoted to each candidate.

The post-reform era is littered with presidential candidacies made and unmade by media coverage. Ed Muskie outpolled George McGovern in both Iowa and New Hampshire in 1972, yet the press treated McGovern like the winner in both cases, setting him on a path to the Democratic nomination. Jimmy Carter received a similar publicity boost after finishing behind an uncommitted slate of Iowa delegates in 1976. Reporters and commentators accepted Bill Clinton's self-proclaimed persona as the "comeback kid" at the expense of Paul Tsongas, the actual winner of the 1992 New Hampshire primary. In the 2000s, media favorites John McCain and Barack Obama benefited from sympathetic coverage while the unlucky Howard Dean became a media dartboard for the sin of screaming too loudly in a concession speech. Donald Trump attracted far more press attention than any other candidate in 2016, to the frustration of rivals who found it much harder to get their messages out to the public.

Journalists sometimes resist acknowledging their sizable influence over nominations, and may not always be fully conscious of the central role they can play in determining the outcome. But when party leaders attempt to assert power at the potential expense of the media, members of the press quickly rise to defend the prerogatives of themselves and their peers.

The Democratic National Committee announced this week that Fox News Channel would not be authorized to hold a debate among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, in the wake of reports confirming the de facto alliance between Fox News and the Trump White House. Rather than respect political leaders' judgment about how their own party's nomination process should operate, prominent journalists immediately blasted the DNC, vouching for their Fox News colleagues in the face of a perceived affront to their professional rectitude. Some even accepted the DNC's premise that Fox would treat Democratic candidates with more hostility than the other news outlets hosting debates in 2020, suggesting that the gauntlet of a Fox-organized debate was not a trap to be avoided but rather a test of character that the party was failing.

 "If you can't answer questions—especially if they're not the questions you want asked—maybe you don't have good answers," snorted Jonathan Allen of NBC. "And if you aren't prepared for tough questions/subjects in a primary debate, how will you handle the general?" chided Zeke Miller of the Associated Press. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times preferred the ha-ha-you-suckered-yourself style of riposte: "it sends a message of being afraid of something. Which is what Trump feeds off in opponents."

Beneath this outburst of (self-)righteous indignation is a set of powerful assumptions: that the press—not voters or party leaders—properly holds the job of asking "tough questions" (and judging the worthiness of the answers) during the nomination process, and that televised debates are the most important venue for performing this critical task. Parties "expect the forums to produce infomercials that glorify their candidates, not journalistic grillings," taunted Jack Shafer of Politico, who went on to argue that any candidate who didn't want to participate in a debate sponsored by a disfavored cable network should "be disqualified from running" for the presidency—in case any doubt remained about where Shafer thinks the power to choose the nation's political leadership should rightfully reside.

One quirky attribute of American media culture is the consensus veneration of debates as a uniquely sacred exercise in civic enlightenment. The origin of this precept is somewhat mysterious; perhaps it's a romanticized legacy of Messrs. Lincoln and Douglas, or maybe it just reflects a collective belief that campaign events organized by the media are definitionally superior to those produced by the candidates and parties. In any case, a frank and unsentimental re-evaluation of its experiential soundness is decades overdue. It's not hard to recall important debates, or moments in debates, in both primaries and general elections. But nearly all of them involve candidate mannerisms, zingers, or gaffes (gaffe after gaffe after gaffe), not important substantive discussions or revelations. Is this really the best way to choose a president?

The Republican National Committee recently pondered this question as well. Republican leaders concluded that there were too many debates during the 2012 nomination season, which (in their view) gave an undeserved platform to secondary candidates while pushing their eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, into taking positions that were ultimately damaging to the party's general election chances (Romney's endorsement of "self-deportation" as an immigration policy, blamed in retrospect for costing him Latino support, was made during a Republican primary debate). In response, the RNC, like the DNC, acted after 2012 to limit the number of debates and take greater control of the sponsors and moderators.

The parties naturally perceive a strategic advantage in a nomination procedure that bolsters the chances of producing a nominee who can unify the party, be a formidable general election candidate, and possess the skills to govern successfully. But surely the American public would also be well-served by a choice of presidential candidates who possess such qualities. And it's not clear that the incentives governing the media's coverage of elections necessarily favor an equally desirable set of characteristics, despite the self-important proclamations of some self-appointed gatekeepers.

With the mixed track record of the media-dominated nomination process over half a century of history, perhaps both national committees deserve some deference to tinker strategically with aspects of the current system without facing attacks from journalists acting as if their personal honor has been outrageously besmirched by rank partisan interlopers. For some, it may not be easy to conceive of a situation where the interest of the public is not aligned by definition with that of the press, or is instead more closely matched with that of the perennially-maligned party organizations. But as Nina Simone used to sing, "it be's that way sometime."

Post-Debates Recap: Is 2016 An Exception Or the New Normal?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in the final scheduled debate last night, passing a milepost marking the home stretch of the campaign. The overall dynamics and candidate strategy on display last night closely resembled those of the first two debates. Clinton was once again well-prepped and bent on goading Trump into counterproductive responses on his main points of vulnerability. Trump was once again extemporaneous and free-associative, focusing on broad themes instead of policy details.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump has been badly hurt by the debates. On September 26, the day of the first debate, the FiveThirtyEight model estimated that Clinton was leading Trump by 46 percent to 45 percent in the national popular vote and by 278 to 260 in the electoral vote, with just a 55 percent projected chance of winning the election. Today, Clinton is estimated to hold a lead of 50 percent to 43 percent in the popular vote and 343 to 194 in the electoral vote, adding up to an 87 percent chance of victory on November 8.

This shift no doubt partially reflects other developments that have occurred over the period that the debates were held—especially the Billy Bush tape and subsequent accusations against Trump. And Clinton was already the favorite to win the race even before they occurred. But I think the bulk of the evidence points toward the debates having a significant independent effect on the relative standing of the candidates, especially because they generated negative news coverage of Trump that persisted for days after the events themselves. Trump's refusal last night to commit to respecting the outcome of the election is likewise poised to dominate this week's coverage—to his further disadvantage—which means that the debates may continue to hurt his chances further over the next several days.

If true, the power of the debates to shift public opinion is another way in which the 2016 election departs from the usual pattern. Though debates receive a lot of attention every year, and media figures always spend a lot of time explaining which candidate "won" each face-off, previous research had concluded that the effects of debate performances on the horse race tended to be quite temporary when they existed at all. If Clinton winds up winning the election by a margin comparable to her current lead, we may regard the debates in retrospect as significant events in the trajectory of the race.

Political scientists have taken our share of lumps this election from our critics, largely because most of us didn't expect the Republican Party to nominate Trump (a conclusion which, to be fair, we were hardly alone in reaching). One recurrent point of difference between political science and popular media is that many journalists and pundits tend to interpret electoral outcomes as mostly reflecting the different personalities and strategies of the candidates, while political scientists more commonly emphasize the role of fundamental factors like partisanship and economic performance in shaping the choices of voters. (This view is sometimes caricatured as a belief that "campaigns don't matter," which no political scientist I know has ever claimed.)

If the debates are revealed to be a major factor in determining the vote margin in the 2016 election, however, it's fair to point out that campaign effects turned out to be bigger than some of us assumed. When analysis built on investigation of previous elections fails to hold in a new case, there are three possible explanations:

1. The analysis was flawed even when applied to previous cases.

2. The analysis was sound in the past, but the current case doesn't fit because the world has changed—and future cases will resemble the current case more than past cases.

3. The analysis was sound in the past and will be again in the future, but the current case represents a temporary deviation from the long-term norm.

Our least charitable critics will probably argue that (1) is likely to be true—we just don't know what we're talking about and never did. But as even they must acknowledge, there's plenty of reason to believe that this particular election is just different from previous elections, with Trump's nomination either a cause or a symptom of this difference.

We can even come up with very plausible hypotheses about why the debates would matter more for a candidate like Trump than a candidate like Mitt Romney or John McCain: perhaps voters had less confidence in Trump's ability to do the job of president, rendering a substandard debate performance all the more damaging to his chances. Or maybe the press coverage of Trump has been much more negative than previous candidates over the same period. Alternatively, though it's tempting to rely on a Trump-centric explanation to account for everything that's distinctive about this election, maybe the debates mattered more because of something unique about Hillary Clinton. Perhaps her relatively strong debate performances helped her consolidate the support of younger voters and independents who never liked Trump but preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton and were won over once the debates focused their attention on the choice before them this November.

The bigger challenge is to distinguish condition (2) from condition (3). In the heat of a campaign's final weeks, when it's very hard to step back and gain a broader perspective, we often assume that the current state of the world will pertain indefinitely into the future—for example, that Trump's particular brand of politics is here to stay in the Republican Party even if he loses the election. Sometimes that's right, but sometimes we're simply in the midst of a temporary departure from the usual order of things. Until we are able to gain the benefit of experience—or, as political scientists might put it, more data—we won't know for sure how much of what's extraordinary about the 2016 election is merely a product of the moment, and how much is a foreshadowing of the new normal.

2nd Debate Recap: Back to the Tape

I wrote earlier that Donald Trump's real audience tonight was the press and other Republican politicians more than the voters. On this score, Trump probably emerged from the debate having preserved, but not necessarily improved, his current standing. The general media consensus seems to be that Trump, even if he did not "win" the debate outright, performed better than he had last time. He at least avoided any kind of immediately embarrassing gaffe or line-crossing in the eyes of the press that would be a candidate for constant TV replay and/or viral video status over the next week.

At the same time, the debate failed to produce a sufficiently memorable positive story for Trump that would be likely to divert attention for very long from his remarks on the Access Hollywood bus, which will probably continue to dominate media coverage and political chatter over the following days. Most debates, despite their extensive advance hype, tend to soon fade into history without pushing the race very far in either direction, and the emergence of other, more fascinating developments over the weekend may hasten this pattern in the present case.

We can probably conclude from Hillary Clinton's fairly unmemorable performance that her campaign wouldn't mind if people spend the next week talking about the Trump tape rather than the debate. Clinton was well-drilled as always, but she lacked some of the prefabricated attack lines that she had brought to the first event. Even her response to the subject of the tape was less impassioned than it could have been, which suggests that she has adopted the front-runner's traditional strategy of staying out of the way of the opposition as the clock runs down.

Van Jones of CNN advanced the theory that Trump's good-enough performance was actually the worst-case scenario for Republicans, because a total meltdown would have prompted them to dump Trump from the ticket and replace him with a stronger candidate. But Trump can't actually be dumped—people are already voting in some states—and the Republicans are stuck with him as their official nominee for the duration. Whether or not Republican leaders renounce him or deny his campaign the resources of the Republican National Committee will not be affected by his debate performance Sunday night, but rather will be determined by the fallout of the Access Hollywood tape—and the natural question of whether any more damaging revelations still await us.

Trump's Audience Tonight: Other Republicans & the Media

Tonight's presidential debate employs a "town hall" format, in which candidates take questions from undecided voters in attendance as well as the moderators. But we shouldn't think of the most important audience as the mass public at large. For this debate, the people who will decide the winner are not the average citizens watching in the hall or at home but rather the partisan and media authorities who will determine in the wake of tonight's event whether Donald Trump's campaign is salvageable.

Trump is now in a precarious position. His problem is not only that he has become very likely to lose the presidential race to Clinton but that he is also being judged as toxic to the political fortunes of the larger Republican Party, both on the ballot this November and thereafter. Several Republican congressional candidates in highly competitive races have already distanced themselves from Trump this weekend. But many more party leaders are still nominally Trump supporters, even if they seldom spend much time talking about him.

If the news media collectively decide that Trump has had a poor debate tonight—especially if he is seen as failing to effectively address his Access Hollywood comments—Republican politicians won't wait around until all the polls are in before renouncing him. We can then expect even more denunciations and declarations of non-support in the hours and days after the debate, almost assuring that Trump is damaged further in the eyes of the public as open conflict erupts between the Trump campaign and a growing faction of Republican critics.

A normal presidential candidate would grasp this political reality. He or she would engage in extensive pre-debate preparations with an eye toward reassuring Republican leaders and ensuring that media expectations for a debate performance would be met or exceeded. But Trump is not a normal candidate with normal calculations, and we therefore do not have any particular reason to believe that his behavior tonight will have either the intention or the effect of impressing elite observers in the party or the press. We also have good reason to expect that Hillary Clinton will walk into the debate with the goal of further baiting Trump into sabotaging himself in front of this key audience, putting other Republicans in the awkward position of having to choose sides between Trump's strong supporters and the increasingly anti-Trump larger electorate.

Trump is a man who is capable of surprise, so it's possible that the debate will proceed in an unexpected direction. But regardless of what he says and does tonight, the people whom he needs to impress the most are not regular voters but rather the politicians and media figures who are currently preparing a death watch around his candidacy. We'll know by tomorrow how many defenders Trump has left within the ranks of his own party, and thus whether Trump still stands a chance of avoiding a disastrous final few weeks before the election.

VP Debate Recap: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Pence's performance demonstrated that the Trump campaign is in fact capable of supplying adequate preparation for a candidate in advance of a debate. This suggests that Trump's more off-the-cuff style in the first presidential debate reflects his own strategic decisions more than the capacity of his campaign staff.

2. Tim Kaine walked into the debate with a well-rehearsed strategy to attack Donald Trump on three main points: his tax returns; his remarks about women, racial minorities, and immigrants; and his attitude towards Russia and Vladimir Putin. Over and over, Kaine attempted to return the discussion to one of these topics, repeating some of the same charges verbatim to Pence's growing exasperation (near the end of the debate, as Kaine mentioned Trump's negative characterization of Mexican immigrants for the nth time, Pence complained to Kaine that "you whipped out that Mexican thing again!"). Pence's equally clear and consistent strategy was to deflect attacks on Trump by flatly denying their validity and even truthfulness without litigating the point more extensively.

3. The result was a fairly unedifying event with an odd energy and rhythm to it. Kaine's hyper-aggressive demeanor seemed likely to play less well in the eyes of the news media—and, perhaps, the viewers—than Pence's cooler style. At the same time, Kaine succeeded in making Trump the major topic of discussion, repeatedly forcing Pence into the position of either defending Trump or letting Kaine's attacks go unanswered. If Pence had hoped to turn the debate into an extensive examination of Clinton's own political vulnerabilities, his opportunity to do so was limited by Kaine's approach, which seemed designed to motivate the party base, play for a tie, and avoid taking a big risk at this stage of the race.

4. At times, viewers could catch a glimpse of what the 2016 campaign might have looked like had someone other than Trump won the Republican nomination. Pence lobbed a few attacks in the direction of the Obama administration on the subjects of the economy, terrorism, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Affordable Care Act, attempting to frame the race as a familiar "change-versus-more-of-the-same" referendum on the incumbent presidency. One could have imagined a Democratic response that in turn attempted to turn the election into a proxy battle over whether Obama was, despite his failures, still a better president than his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. But Trump has a way of shifting attention in his direction, and even the positive media evaluations of Pence's performance have been accompanied by discussions of whether Trump will be satisfied with his running mate's efforts at defending him or even will resent being outperformed by his own vice presidential pick. For better or worse, Trump appears likely to once again dominate media coverage in the aftermath of a debate—even though he wasn't even present this time.

Debate Recap: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. The two candidates are in some ways representative personifications of their parties. Matt Grossmann and I have a post up at the Monkey Cage today looking at the debate through the lens of Asymmetric Politics. Like a typical Democrat, Clinton emphasized specific policies, while Donald Trump's preference for broader rhetorical themes fell in line with the pattern of previous Republican candidates.

2. It is important to undergo thorough pre-debate preparation and practice in order to deliver a performance that will be judged satisfactory by the news media. The rules—both official and unofficial—of these events give a decisive advantage to candidates who have memorized pointed and pithy responses to likely topics and questions, who strategically seek to draw their opponents into discussions of unfavorable subjects, and who project an image of good-humored unflappability throughout. This was the lesson of the first Obama-Romney debate in 2012, and it was reinforced again last night. Unlike Clinton, Trump exhibited no sign of having prepared for the debate in any systematic way, which affected the crispness and intelligibility of his own responses as well as his ability to defend himself and counterattack in exchanges with Clinton.

3. With that said, it is worth considering more explicitly how much the debates should properly influence voters' impressions of the candidates. If the difference between a "good" and "bad" performance is primarily a function of how disciplined a candidate is in subjecting him- or herself to the generally annoying task of debate prep, rather than an indicator of substantive command of policy, personal character, or other attributes, are we judging debate participants on grounds that have much to do with their actual responsibilities in office?

4. For the past several weeks, there has been something of an offensive among Democrats, especially noticeable on Twitter, against the prevailing media coverage of the campaign. Democratic complaints have included what they view as insufficient coverage of dishonest behavior by Trump, ineffective or absent media "fact-checking" of Trump's public claims, and excessive media preoccupation with Clinton's email practices and the activity of the Clinton Foundation. These critiques reached a peak after the September 7 candidate forum hosted by Matt Lauer, who was accused by Democrats of being tougher on Clinton than Trump, and evolved into an open discussion over the past several days about whether it would be proper for a debate moderator to challenge or correct factual misstatements by candidates. (Not irrelevant to the partisan dimension of this subject is moderator Candy Crowley's decision to "fact-check" Mitt Romney's claims about Benghazi in the 2012 town hall debate, which Democrats and Republicans alike commonly view in retrospect as a turning point in the election.)

It seems likely that these complaints, whether they represent sincere advocacy of media responsibility, cynical working of the referees, or a bit of both, had some effect on Lester Holt's performance last night. Holt moderated with a light touch, but he did explicitly dispute Trump's claim of consistent opposition to the Iraq War, and his line of questioning included a few tough personal challenges of Trump (most notably on the subject of "birtherism" and Trump's claim that Clinton lacked a "presidential look"). When combined with recent media coverage that devotes more attention to examples of Trump's dishonesty, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Democrats have partially succeeded in convincing journalists on this point.