Matthew Yglesias: Don’t let Trump and Biden abandon the debates

One of the few bipartisan traditions left in American politics is hating on the presidential debates. They’re never substantive enough, the moderators always intervene too much or too little and they have little effect on voters. Who needs ’em?

So reports that President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are contemplating skipping this year’s edition, put on by the Commission on Presidential Debates every four years since 1988, are hardly surprising. Trump didn’t participate in any Republican primary debates either, and the Republican National Committee withdrew from the debate commission two years ago. Biden has declined to commit to its 2024 schedule.

It is left to me to … well, if I can’t quite defend the debates, I can at least say this: We’ll miss them when they’re gone. The only thing worse than presidential debates may be a campaign without them.

In deed, in a pedantic sense, they are hardly “debates” at all. The candidates exchange talking points, deliver a handful of rehearsed quips and the “winner” is often proclaimed on a somewhat arbitrary basis by the media.

And yet for all their flaws, the debates do offer something magical: They are a shared national political experience. Devoted partisans on both sides will watch, along with the tiny handful of high-information swing voters who actually pay close attention to political campaigns.

One fact often obscured by America’s highly polarized two-party politics is that the U.S. is a very large and diverse country. Both party coalitions include lots of people who have significant disagreements with each other. The easiest way to manage those disagreements is to keep your partisans focused on the negative aspects of the other side, often by serving up highly caricatured portrayals of your opponents. At this point, it almost seems as if the majority of Democrats and Republicans are convinced that the other party’s nominee is senile.

There’s a way to gainsay that impression — and inform voters of the rivals’ actual positions on the issues: Put the two candidates side by side on a debate stage for an extended period of time. Biden partisans could watch Trump talk in uninterrupted stretches, and vice versa. That’s very unlikely to dramatically change anyone’s opinion. But it would be a small step toward a healthier society with something more resembling a consensus reality.

Politicians have less to lose from ducking debates because they no longer need the cooperation of the mainstream media to get their message out. The difficulty of getting the tradition off the ground was always the fear that the front-runner would regard it as too risky. The flipside is that ducking a debate would also be a risk. Nobody wants to look chicken.

In any economic environment, returns accrue to the scarce factors of production, which in this case is the candidates themselves. If they want to appear on television, it will be at a time and a setting of their choosing. Presidents, of course, have become increasingly hesitant to do even this. Biden has done fewer news conferences than not only Trump but also Barack Obama. And it’s hard to blame them. Modern presidents can tweet, vlog, TikTok or whatever else if they want people to hear what they have to say rather than fielding hardballs from reporters trying to trip them up.

Debates, for all their flaws, are a rare opportunity to get out of those silos and make everyone who pays attention to the news watch and argue about more or less the same thing. That in and of itself obviously doesn’t end partisanship or polarization or anything else. But it’s something. And if it fades away, we’ll miss it.