Perhaps 1 percent of American voters will act as described in the first sentence. The most recent time the second sentence applied may have been late 2012, but even then it may not have been the case.
This sounds cynical, and maybe it is, but it is arguably the ideal form of candidate selection outlined above simply won’t happen. To some extent, the system is designed so that it doesn’t have to happen. Political parties exist primarily to allow people to choose candidates with less friction. While the debates may sway some people’s votes, probably not much, given that they rarely focus on actual policy arguments.
All of this raises the question: Will Thursday night’s debate between President Biden and President Donald Trump make a difference?
To answer this question we need to consider two things. First, what has happened in the past? Second, why is this year different?
Let’s look at just the seven debates that have taken place since 2016, including the three presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump that year and the vice presidential debate in 2016. We also have the two meetings between Biden and Trump in 2020 and the debate between Kamala D. Harris and Mike Pence in October of that year.
In each case, we can see that the polling averages shifted in the weeks after the first debate but then remained relatively stable.
In 2016, Clinton increased her average of 538 points by 3.4 points in the three weeks after the debates. Trump lost 2 points. Some of this increase may have been due to the impact of the second debate, which took place about two weeks later, or the release of the Access Hollywood tape on October 7, 2016, in which Trump was heard talking about assaulting women.
Trump saw a big boost in his approval ratings in the three weeks after the third debate, but that was a spike in the polls as Election Day approached. A lot had happened at that point, and it’s not clear that the debates played a big role.
Of course, that’s one of the challenges here: Presidential debates don’t take place in a vacuum, and perceptions and support for candidates can shift for a variety of reasons.
But in 2020, Biden’s approval rating rose again and Trump’s dropped in the three weeks after the first debate, but there was no significant change in either of the other two debates.
There have been many studies assessing the extent to which presidential debates affect vote choice, but there is little evidence that they do. One study published in 2017 suggested that watching a debate can affect voters’ perceptions of the candidates, but this depends largely on how commentators discuss the debate after it has ended.
One of the study’s authors, Ethan Porter of George Washington University, appeared on a podcast in 2019 to discuss the research, which centered around the 2016 debate.
“People who watched MSNBC’s post-debate coverage were significantly more favorably disposed toward Hillary Clinton on a range of subsequent measures across the full range of issues,” Porter said, “and people who watched Fox News were significantly more favorably disposed toward Donald Trump on a range of subsequent measures.”
“But we found no effect on vote choice,” he added. “So while watching Fox’s debate coverage may make people more likable towards Donald Trump, it doesn’t seem to make them more likely to vote for him. The same is true for MSNBC and Hillary Clinton.”
People who watched the debate generally felt that Clinton did better, he said, “except in the context of watching the Fox News coverage after the debate. They really managed to stifle attitudes toward Clinton on all fronts.”
This isn’t surprising, but it’s useful to be aware of. in The arguments are often less important than what actually happens. rear A lot of that has to do with the content of the debate, the commentary around it, and how snippets of the debate spread on social media these days — many people who didn’t watch the debate will see out-of-context clips from the debate in their feeds, but that won’t change how they vote.
As University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden noted Thursday, debate viewership has been on the rise since the 1990s, but that could be due in part to a growing focus on partisan identity: People may be tuning in to root for their team’s representatives rather than to learn more about the candidates.
That said, we have to acknowledge that things may be different this year, and that Thursday’s debate may have an impact that other recent debates haven’t had.
First, it’s the first debate. In 2016 and 2020, polls changed after the first debate (though not necessarily because of it), so that could happen again. This debate is especially true because it’s earlier in the election cycle, so there are fewer competing factors influencing people’s voting choices. But it also works the other way around, because there will probably be fewer people ready to lock in their voting choices in June.
Another consideration is that the performance itself is subject to scrutiny. Trump and his allies have leaned heavily into the idea that Biden is physically weak or mentally frail, and any minor gaffe by the president could have major consequences. This is where social media ripples become important: Republicans have had little hesitation in taking videos of Biden out of context and portraying them negatively, and there is little reason to think that they or the Trump campaign won’t do so with the debate footage.
Second, and least likely, a candidate will offer policy proposals that can withstand criticism and change voters’ minds about his or her candidacy.
Something even stranger has happened.
