Il next 27 June will be held on first of the two debates TV shows between Joe Biden and Donald Trump ahead of the elections presidential elections on November 5. The second is scheduled for September 10th.
The 90-minute confrontation on June 27 will be held in the studios of CNN, one of the major television networks in the United States. It will take place with strict rules given the hostility between the two contenders and the precedents of the 2020 confrontations. CNN said that "Moderators will use all the tools at their disposal to respect deadlines and ensure a civil discussion."
There will be no opening statements. President Biden and former President Trump will each have two minutes to answer questions and just one minute for replies and replies to replies. Red lights visible to candidates will flash when they have five seconds remaining and turn solid red when the time is up. Each candidate's microphone will be turned off when it is not their turn to speak. Candidates will be given a break during two commercial breaks, but will be prohibited from consulting or meeting with advisors while they are off the air.
It is thus hoped to offer the public a "civil" confrontation, to use the words of CNN which is, unlike Fox News, a network hostile to Trump which went so far as to address one of the two moderators of the confrontation, the journalist Jake Tapper , with the epithet “fake Tapper”. In 2020, more than 73 million viewers watched the first debate between Biden and Trump. There are many who believe that the movement of voters due to this event could decide the fate of the presidential elections.
We once again turned to Professor Stefano Luconi, professor of History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua, to gain insight into the significance of these events in the history of the American presidential elections.
Professor, what tradition exists in American history of a direct confrontation between presidential candidates?
These appointments between the candidates for the White House are now considered usual moments of the electoral campaign. However, in a country like the United States, where the introduction of universal male suffrage for white citizens dates back to the third decade of the nineteenth century, the direct comparison between aspirants to the main federal elective office is a relatively recent acquisition, which has coincided with the emergence of television as a means of mass communication after the Second World War.
What happened previously?
Previously, presidential candidates had never made use of this tool after winning their parties' nominations. The seven debates which, when newspapers were the only source of information, pitted Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1858 are still famous. The two would have run for president in 1860, but the confrontation that went down in history took place two years earlier and what was at stake was one of Illinois' two seats in the federal Senate, not the Oval Office.
With the advent of radio, this medium could have provided a vehicle for comparing the personalities and programs of candidates. Was it really useful?
Radio did not give rise to direct confrontations between the aspirants to the White House during the electoral campaigns although it was created in the United States precisely to respond to a primary interest in politics: the first American commercial station, KDKA of Pittsburgh, inaugurated its broadcasts on November 2, 1920 with a program dedicated to the results of that year's presidential elections and, during the XNUMXs, both Republican President Herbert Hoover and his Democratic successor Franklin D. Roosevelt used to address citizens via radio.
However, Roosevelt refused to confront his challenger in 1940. Why?
In fact, in 1940 the Republican candidate for the White House, Wendell Willkie, challenged Roosevelt, who had obtained the Democratic nomination to hold a third term, to address the most important issues on the radio before the vote. Willkie was not a professional politician: he was a corporate lawyer and business executive. In 1938 he brilliantly supported a debate on the relationship between the public and private sectors with the assistant attorney general (a sort of undersecretary of Justice) Robert H. Jackson during the program America's Town Meeting of the Air on the NBC radio network (National Broadcasting Company). Roosevelt feared embarrassing questions about the possible entry of the United States, still formally neutral, into the Second World War, which could make him lose votes among the numerous isolationist voters. Therefore, he refused the confrontation with Willkie, on the pretext that discussing openly with his opponent was not very "presidential", that is, it was not suitable for a statesman who posed as a super partes figure and symbol of national unity in a period of global crisis . After the Second World War, radio was the scene of a single debate. The fight, however, was not between the presidential candidates, but between Thomas E. Dewey and Harold Stassen fighting for the Republican nomination.
In 1939 NBC began regular broadcasts in the United States. When did the first televised confrontations between candidates date back?
The first took place in 1956, but did not involve the winners of the presidential nomination. As in the case of radio, the first two television debates also concerned primary elections, in this case the democratic ones: in 1956 Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver faced each other, while in 1960 John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey clashed. However, the attempt to bring together Stevenson, who had prevailed over Kefauver, and Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, running for confirmation, in front of the cameras in 1956 was unsuccessful.
And so we arrive at 1960 with the famous television confrontations between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon which many believe were decisive in Kennedy's election as President
That's right. It was only in 1960 that the era of televised debates between candidates for the White House began. That year there were four and their protagonists were Kennedy, fresh victor over Humphrey, and the Republican Richard M. Nixon, the incumbent vice president. Kennedy triumphed above all in the first one, broadcast on September 26, not so much for his statements but for how he appeared on video. Not surprisingly, those who listened to the debate on the radio were convinced that Nixon had won.
The image begins to weigh in the voters' evaluation. Real?
Yes. Although Kennedy was only four years younger than Nixon, the images highlighted his youth, a perception that met the need of part of the electorate in favor of a modernization of politics after eight years of Republican control of the White House. Furthermore, Nixon, unaccustomed to television, had not shaved and did not use greasepaint, with the result that he looked much older than his 47 years. The blue shirt, which appeared gray on the black-and-white video, made Nixon a dark and gloomy figure who did not inspire the confidence of viewers.
Nixon's "bad impression" was a bit of a lesson. For example, Johnson remembered it
Nixon's failure on the small screen caused the debates to be suspended. In 1964 the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, aware that he was not telegenic, avoided facing his Republican challenger Barry Goldwater. In 1968 and 1962 Nixon did not want to risk repeating the debacle of 1960. The return to video confrontations, however, once again did not please the Republican candidate.
As happens to Gerald Ford
In 1976, President Gerald Ford made a gaffe that contributed to his defeat against Democrat Jimmy Carter: at the height of the Cold War he denied that Eastern Europe was under the domination of the Soviet Union.
But with Ronald Reagan the Republicans had an advantage, didn't they?
Since the advent of television debates marked the spectacularization of American politics and contributed to its transformation into a sort of commercial product, the Republican Party was able to take advantage when it nominated a consummate actor such as Ronald Reagan. In a famous passage of the final appeal to the voters in 1980, addressed to an audience of over 80 million, he asked viewers if they were better off under the Democrat Carter, with inflation at 13,5% and the unemployment rate above 7%, of how they felt under Ford's Republican administration.
Reagan also managed to turn his age into an advantage over the younger Walter Mondale. Does a candidate's ability to communicate now become the key component to going to the Oval Office?
In 1984, to refute the perplexities of those who believed that, at 73, he was too old to run again, Reagan ironically observed that it was not his intention to turn age into a political issue and therefore he would not try to take advantage of youth and age. inexperience of his Democratic challenger, fifty-six-year-old Walter Mondale, Carter's former vice president.
Four years later the televised debates were fatal to Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis who made a clear mistake
Yes, in 1988 the power of images became predominant again. Dukakis, an opponent of capital punishment, argued that if his wife had been raped and murdered he would not have harbored hatred towards the murderer and would not have asked for him to be sentenced to death. His impassiveness in his videos conveyed the idea that he was acting out a script, making him seem like an insincere and unreliable candidate and thus helping Republican George HW Bush win the election. The latter, however, in 1992 was caught by cameras looking at his watch during the argument. The shot strengthened his reputation as a politician who considered dialogue and confrontation between different ideas a waste of time, favoring his defeat.
What real weight do the television debates have on the November result?
The precedents cited should not lead us to conclude that television debates have always been decisive for the outcome of the votes. According to polls, Democrat Al Gore prevailed over Republican George W. Bush in 2000, and Republican Mitt Romney won the first debate with Democrat Barack Obama in 2012. Nonetheless, both Gore and Romney were defeated at the polls.
How do you see the debate on June 27th?
Biden seems convinced that the debates can still influence the choice of president in a significant way. The first of this year, in fact, will be held in a completely unusual circumstance. The Democratic and Republican national conventions will not yet have taken place on June 27. Therefore, despite having the delegates to obtain the nomination, neither Biden nor Trump will still appear as the official candidates of their parties. In the past all televised debates took place between September and October, never more than four months before the election date. But Biden wanted to make sure that voters had enough time to forget about his possible gaffes, a necessity that also explains the location of the second debate almost two months after the vote.
Biden should know that there is also social media, which seems to have a similar if not equal impact to that of television
The relevance of debates between presidential candidates today is far less than in the past. The Internet and social media are today the main information tools for a large part of the electorate. It is no coincidence that, faced with an increase in the number of potential voters following population growth, albeit with some moments of discontinuity compared to the declining trend of the connected public, the audience fell from more than 80 million spectators in the second debate between Carter and Reagan in 1980 to the 63 million of the last televised confrontation between Trump and Biden in 2020, which in turn represented a decrease of approximately 8,6 million compared to the final one between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016. Just in In 2016, the preferences expressed in the messages disseminated through the then Twitter (now
And will Kennedy benefit from a televised confrontation?
In fact, the opportunity for national visibility offered by the television debate remains, certainly not for the candidates of the two major parties but for the independents and those of the smaller groups. This explains, for example, the appeal presented by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Federal Election Commission against his exclusion from the two debates this year. It is, however, very unlikely that it will be accepted. The CNN television network, which will host them, has established that only candidates to whom the average poll attributes at least 15% of voting intentions are admitted, while Kennedy Jr. is credited with no more than 10%. Although the threshold adopted is completely arbitrary, it reflects that used as a criterion for previous presidential elections and, in any case, there is no legislative provision that imposes less binding requirements.
We'll meet up for the conventions of the two parties, if nothing significant happens in the meantime.
Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “Indispensable nation". History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) and The black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path to equality, 1619–2023 (2023)
Books: Stefano Luconi, The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5, goWare, 2023, pp. 162, €14,25 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition. Stefano Luconi, US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022, goWare, 2022, pp. 182, €12,35 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
