The Presidential Debate Agreement: Everything That's Wrong With Contemporary American Life

Last week, Joe Biden and Donald Trump came to an agreement to hold two Presidential debates this summer in advance of the November election. That's not a misprint.  Both of the debates are being held in the "summer".  The first debate is scheduled for June 27, a full three months earlier than any previous Presidential debate, and the second debate is scheduled for September 10, still earlier than any previous Presidential debate. What's the hurry?  Well, you see, somewhere along the way it's been decided that voting for a November election needs to begin 7-8 weeks before the actual election day, and now the entire timeline of the debates is expected to shift to indulge this insanity.

Arguably even more indefensible, President Biden dismantled the Commission on Presidential Debates that has organized these debates for nearly a half century, instead wheeling and dealing broadcast rights to specific news outlets.  Why was Biden so motivated to upend the tradition of nonpartisan, nationally broadcast debates?  Presumably there were a few backroom deals he was able to work out favorable terms for, but the most compelling was likely the negotiation to ensure Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s exclusion from the debate and deny him any opportunity to elevate his stature.  Trump's abrupt agreement to the terms Biden laid out highlights their mutual interest in locking in their major-party advantages even if it comes at the exclusion of a debate that is timely and accessible enough to be in any way meaningful toward the intended purpose of an informed electorate.

There's a lot of disgusting stuff to unpack here, but let's start with the delusion of a general election debate held in June and available only on CNN.  Cable subscriptions are at generational lows in the streaming service era, so giving a cable news outlet exclusive access is almost comically reductive in providing voters an informed snapshot of the candidates. I'm sure there will be a streaming option on the CNN website, provided the website doesn't crash as it usually does on election night, but let's be real and acknowledge that the only people who are gonna do that are political junkies who already know who they're gonna vote for.

The second debate, held in September, is at least gonna be on a broadcast station rather than on cable, but only one broadcast station (ABC), disincentivizing civic engagement and putting into question why we pay taxes for public airwaves if an event as unmistakably a public service as a Presidential debate is forced to compete with "NCIS" reruns on another broadcast station.  The predictable result will be the lowest-ever ratings for both Presidential debates, and exposure for the overwhelming majority of Americans being limited to whatever cliff-note version finds its way to their Facebook feed the next day, exacerbating already poisonous trend lines for our democratic experiment.

And in a textbook example of losing the storyline, the primary reason cited for holding these debates so ridiculously early is to service the malignant cancer of early voting.  Recall that the original motivation for introducing early voting was that partisan dirty tricks campaigns were disenfranchising certain voters with, among other things, intentionally long lines at polling stations.  There was definitely some truth to that, but out of the multiple remedies that could have been exercised to diminish this concern, the option we decided upon was opening up voting multiple weeks before the election.  The trend expanded during the pandemic and locked in place an indefensible new normal where millions of people will have already cast ballots in September for an election ostensibly being held on November 5.

The irony here, of course, is that in the name of combating voter disenfranchisement, bowing to early voting as the bedrock principle of our democracy is now forcing a scenario where debate viewership is likely to decline by 80% or more, with the low-information voter demographic most in need of watching the debate being less likely to participate than most given its scheduling.  By pandering to those all keyed up to vote in September, we're less likely to reach the voters who need motivating to get engaged in the process for November.  

Furthermore, as someone who grew up in a state where a Senate candidate was killed in a plane crash 11 days before the election, I can predict with unwavering certitude that it won't end well when an inevitable black swan event occurs throwing an election into chaos.  As chaotic as these situations are generally, imagine the legal Wild West we'd be in if a black swan event occurred before election day but after millions of early votes had already been banked.  Specific to this race, we certainly increase the odds of a black swan event when our political parties insist on nominating octogenarians.

As for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., I'm not a fan, but I'm less of a fan of changing long-established rules in the ninth inning to exclude a candidate who spooks the partisan duopoly.  If RFK Jr. is polling in double-digits, it's hard to make a case why he shouldn't be included in the debate just as John Anderson was in 1980 and Ross Perot was in 1992 when they hit similar metrics.  At the very least, it should have been the Commission on Presidential Debates that made that call, not the backroom dealings of the Biden and Trump campaigns with select media barons standing to cash in from RFK's exclusion.

One of the biggest problems our republic is facing is the lack of any shared civic or cultural experiences.  Everything about the 2024 debate scheduling leans into the toxic trends tearing the country apart. Whether it be limiting broadcasting rights for the debate to the highest bidder, making Presidential debates a pay-per-view proposition, or further normalizing a voting scheme where ballots are cast in September and counted in December, the choices made by our governing class and corporate media seem intent on exacerbating our divisions and disunity even more.