When the Biden and Trump campaigns pushed aside the Commission on Presidential Debates to strike separate arrangements with broadcasters, no one seemed to recognize that, but for the commission’s nearly four decades of work, there would be no televised debates. And without it, there may be no debates in the future.
The fact that we have presidential debates at all is the work of the commission. It would be easy now to lose them for good.
The commission took over sponsorship of the debates in 1988 after the League of Women Voters, which had sponsored them since 1976, struggled to get the campaigns to agree on anything, from the number of debates to whether the candidates would even show up.
Four years earlier, the league had gone through a list of 103 journalists before the Reagan and Mondale campaigns agreed on four who would serve as a panel of moderators. Both campaigns had rejected the league’s proposal for a single moderator and threatened to walk if they didn’t get their way.
The commission was created to fix that problem. In 1987, separate reports from Harvard and Georgetown proposed a new, nonpartisan sponsoring organization that would give the major parties a bigger role in the process and thus apply pressure on candidates to appear. The commission was incorporated the same year, and Americans have had an uninterrupted series of televised debates ever since — including in 1992, when independent Ross Perot was invited to participate in all three debates.
The debates are flawed in many ways. No, they’re not “real” debates. Yes, they are political theater. But they have become the centerpiece of campaign coverage for a reason: They are the only time the candidates appear together under conditions they do not control.
Debates reveal candidates’ views and positions in a way no other event or presidential campaign does, including speeches, rallies and advertisements. Even after the bar-fight style first debate of 2020, some of the editorial commentary about what voters saw that night made exactly that point. What critics miss is that the choice has never been between ideal debates and less ideal debates, but between debates and no debates.
Despite its success, the commission has long been lambasted by candidates from the right and the left. Steve Forbes, a presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, who called the commission a “corrupt duopoly,” and Jesse Jackson, who labeled it as “fundamentally undemocratic,” are two examples.
Also, independent candidates have repeatedly sued the commission, claiming the debates violate the First Amendment, tax and antitrust law and federal election law. Most of these lawsuits targeted the commission’s criteria for inclusion — that candidates demonstrate 15 percent public support in an average of five national polls and appear on enough state ballots to earn an Electoral College victory. These are the same rules that broadcasters are using this year. The commission has won all such challenges.
Over the years journalists have been no less dismissive. In 2020, they were especially critical.
Columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post called for the remaining debates to be canceled after the chaos of the first. When the commission made the second debate virtual because it could not be certain of the president’s health status, leading him to withdraw, Vox called for the debates to be ended “forever.” The Wall Street Journal wrote that the commission should be “retired” and that the two major parties should replace it as organizer, an arrangement that would be illegal under federal election law.
Among the enduring myths about the presidential debates is that the campaigns control them. But the candidates do not determine eligibility, nor do they choose the venues, debate questions, moderators or anything else.
They argue about things like the height of podiums, handshakes and notepaper. They issue “memoranda of understanding” in which they announce debate “rules.” This is pure political posturing. For the commission to sign any such memorandum would violate the Federal Election Commission’s requirement that any sponsor be nonpartisan.
I expect the news organizations sponsoring this year’s debates will perform professionally (even with the regrettable inclusion of commercials), but I also expect that they will run into the same problem that plagued the League of Women Voters 40 years ago.
There are debates this year because the campaign is so close — the candidates need to debate. But there is no reason to think future candidates who have a lead in the polls, particularly incumbents, will agree to meet challengers they didn’t choose on a live national stage. Another political norm will fall, and that will be a loss for all of us.
Craig LaMay is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and co-author of “Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future” (University of Chicago, 2008).