The Debate Tonight Cannot Be Won—but It Can Be Lost

Somehow, the first Republican primary debate for the 2024 presidential season is already upon us this Wednesday. Much ink has already been spilled over these throwdowns. For one thing, front-runner Donald Trump has said he is not going to show up to this or any other presidential primary debate. For another, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hoping to “win” the debate and turn things around, and that it will serve as the beginning, finally, of a reset. Some have suggested that other candidates, like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, can use the debate to break through; Scott is reportedly hoping the debate will “electrify” the campaign.

But here’s the thing: It won’t do that, because the debates do not have that power. The power of debates, to the extent such a thing exists, can hurt lesser candidates more than it can help them. It’s also an unpredictable power, one that can’t be bottled by a debate prep team or campaign consultant.

For one thing, according to political science, debates aren’t changing hearts and minds. For example, a 2019 study by Harvard Business School associate professor Vincent Pons and University of California at Berkeley graduate student Caroline Le Pennec found that debates neither help undecided voters make up their minds nor change the minds of those who already know how they’re going to vote. Polls have suggested that presidential debates don’t change who’s in the lead.

This is also backed up by our current lived experience. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles, Trump treated the debates more like wrestling matches—giving each of his opponents a little nickname or stalking Hillary Clinton around the stage or yelling nonstop at Joe Biden—than he did an exercise in articulating policy. This did not matter—or, rather, it did, in the sense that his supporters were heartened by it, in the way they are by his rallies, but not in the sense that he “won” any of the debates, primary or general. And Biden was hardly the star of the 2020 presidential primary debates, at one point suggesting that parents needed to make sure that the record player was on at night to educate their children. This did not matter in terms of the primary’s outcome, either.

That isn’t to say that debates don’t ever matter. Sometimes they do, in that they can be detrimental to a candidate, especially if that candidate isn’t the front-runner or someone who already strongly appeals to many voters. If a candidate was a long shot, a well-delivered blow can hasten their downward spiral—though it probably won’t help the candidate who landed the rhetorical punch.

Kamala Harris seemed flustered when Tulsi Gabbard attacked her record as a prosecutor at a Democratic primary debate in 2019. Gabbard actually overtook Harris in a USA Today/Suffolk poll after that debate (though it’s unclear if, in the long run, this hurt Harris, who is now vice president, or helped Gabbard, who is no longer in the Democratic Party or in Congress).

And it may have been the case that Chris Christie ended Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016 when he attacked Rubio for repeating his prepared line many times, though it may also have been the case that Trump was going to be the candidate no matter what happened. Christie went on to campaign for Trump, who eventually infected him with the novel coronavirus, so it’s unclear who the winner is there, either. And Elizabeth Warren did effectively take down Michael Bloomberg in a presidential debate, though, again, she is still in the Senate, not in the White House. Warren was able to sink a rival—but her debate “win” did not help her, say, win any delegates or a single state primary.

So why don’t all unlikely candidates just go on the offensive, since a defensive moment can spit them out of the race? Well, it’s a risk. Because even when an attack hits a more popular rival, it could endanger the lesser candidate who’s swinging. Leaving aside that none of the successful attackers in the above paragraph are president, Kamala Harris ended up creating a political problem for herself by very effectively bringing up Biden’s opposition to busing and offering the story of a young student who herself benefited from being bused into an integrated public school—“that little girl was me”—without first figuring out what her own position on busing was. Going on the attack similarly helped long-shot Julián Castro stand out in the same primary, when he asked Biden during a debate: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Rather than send Biden tumbling, the jab earned Castro many accusations that he went too far in insinuating that his elderly opponent was not all there. And, again, the target of both of those zingers is now president.

It is possible for candidates to connect to voters during debates, though not necessarily in ways pundits predict. In his 2022 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, seemed to struggle during a debate with Mehmet Oz. While some pundits derided Fetterman’s performance, described it as “painful,” or called it the source of new Democratic anxieties, it didn’t matter in the end: Fetterman’s team was also able to seize on a comment from Oz about local politicians’ involvement in abortion, and some voters felt more empathy for Fetterman than anything else. Some polls suggest his favorability actually improved after the allegedly disastrous debate. Fetterman wound up beating Oz by about 5 percentage points.

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that debates matter because they matter to the reporters and pundits and nerds such as myself who write pieces like this one, which in turn set “narratives.” But while choosing what subjects to cover and ignore is an important responsibility, given that nobody trusts the media, I am not sure what a given commentator has to say about a given debate matters all that much, either.

If debates matter, it’s in one intangible way, which is that it shows that those who would be our elected leaders are still willing to come before us, answer questions they might not want to answer, and be judged for what they say and how they say it. Sometimes that judgment is harsh enough that it breaks a long shot’s delusion that they could hold immense power over the rest of us. But it’s important that they show up and offer themselves up to us for judgment, even if it is unclear exactly how the candidates will be judged or whether that judgment will affect the election at all.