What is the future of primary debates

[Pres Mike]

Its been nearly 16 years since primary debates really mattered or affect the end result. So whats the point? Will the parties continue to have them? How many people will even have cable TV in 2028?

Although I could see a debate hosted by Facebook, Twitter, Youtube even Playstation Network etc

2024: Donald Trump is set to win every primary contest, by a landslide. Never participated in a debate.

2020: President Joe Biden did poorly in the 2020 primary debates, won the nomination comfortably.

2016: Hillary's debates in 2016 were mixed. Bernie did a good job. Lets be honest, Bernie Sanders was never going to win the nomination since Hillary locked up the black 40+ vote. Trump easily won the nomination despite several poor debates

2012: Several Republicans became "flavor of the month" after successful primary debates. Romney still won.

2008: I'll admit that I don't know much about the 2008 Republican primary debates. The debates did matter a lot for Democrats in 2028.

[Open Source Intelligence]

Its been nearly 16 years since primary debates really mattered or affect the end result. So whats the point? Will the parties continue to have them? How many people will even have cable TV in 2028?

Although I could see a debate hosted by Facebook, Twitter, Youtube even Playstation Network etc

2024: Donald Trump is set to win every primary contest, by a landslide. Never participated in a debate.

2020: President Joe Biden did poorly in the 2020 primary debates, won the nomination comfortably.

2016: Hillary's debates in 2016 were mixed. Bernie did a good job. Lets be honest, Bernie Sanders was never going to win the nomination since Hillary locked up the black 40+ vote. Trump easily won the nomination despite several poor debates

2012: Several Republicans became "flavor of the month" after successful primary debates. Romney still won.

2008: I'll admit that I don't know much about the 2008 Republican primary debates. The debates did matter a lot for Democrats in 2028.

The 2008 Republican primary debates had groups in the party looking for something that could win and eventually they gave up and settled on McCain who they didn't really like. Romney was at one point promising but they'd moved on from him. Giuliani was there but people in the end did not support him. Fred Thompson at one point was going to be the savior for this group but his debate performance was pretty poor and that ended his campaign right after it started. The one thing that provided some life was Ron Paul was out of step with the party on things like the Iraq War and everyone liked attacking him on that.

As far as the future, Republican National Party was pretty clearly in the bag to have Trump win this nomination, and the presentation of a splintered mess helped that. I think that got told when Christie and Vivek had their one-on-one threatened by the party. The complaints in the past at a national party arguing about their bylaws level was that the GOP felt that the media controlled too much about the debates and the party wanted greater control. So with there being nothing in 2020, 2024 was the first test of that. Trump and Biden however shows what everyone should know of you can make all the rules you want but the most powerful person can just ignore them for the purposes of winning the nomination.

I think both parties are struggling to figure out how to be inclusive while not giving platforms for no-hopers or people there for ulterior motives (Vivek being this year's crowning example). 2028 for Democrats I doubt they want to have 20 people running like they did in late 2019. Ditto Republicans. With hindsight looking at this Republican field, if we had Haley, DeSantis, Trump, and one of Christie or Pence, the primary debates would've been superior. But without the debates, Haley would've never became the Trump alternative for the party and that instead might've been Tim Scott. It's a conundrum.

If we had defined groups with membership inside parties, you could have "primaries before the primary" and then the real primary campaign and debates has each group inside the party coalition represented. That invisible primary goes on now, it's just unofficial and not written down. Haley won her primary to get to this point against Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, etc.

For TV, as long as they draw big ratings, they'll want them. Especially considering the state of TV at the moment. What TV looks like come 3.5 years is a great question. But I expect a CNN, a Fox News will exist.

[Electric Circus]

They aren't likely to be relevant again unless someone figures out how to produce them in a way that draws attention. The television networks are relying on assumptions about political media that no longer hold.

There could be a place for debates in the future of presidential primaries, but it won't look anything like what we have now, i.e. big television events promoting the parties. The way forward is smaller multi-candidate events geared toward narrower audiences.

[Open Source Intelligence]

They aren't likely to be relevant again unless someone figures out how to produce them in a way that draws attention. The television networks are relying on assumptions about political media that no longer hold.

There could be a place for debates in the future of presidential primaries, but it won't look anything like what we have now, i.e. big television events promoting the parties. The way forward is smaller multi-candidate events geared toward narrower audiences.

Gearing to narrower audiences is a guaranteed way to irrelevance. The only "narrow audience" I ever see realistically occurring is one day you have a Spanish language debate, but even that would be controversial and draw cries of foul play due to the candidates that can't speak Spanish.

Improvements that can be made but won't:

1. No live audience. Just a moderator in a TV studio with the candidates.
2. Put them on a couple hour tape delay and remove the back-and-forth bullsh*t. Tell candidates ahead of time you will. Threaten candidates ahead of time that non-answers to questions get removed from the televised content. No one has the balls to do this however.

[Flats the Flounder]

I think it should be kept in mind that the 2024 primaries are some of the most unusual in recent memory. From the start, there was really no question of who the frontrunner was, and from the start, he never showed up to a single debate, which made all of the primary debates this cycle laughably low-stakes. Some pundits are saying that the debates are more of a primary for VP, but I doubt that too, as Trump isn't going to give VP to someone disloyal to him.

It's true that the debates alone have not changed the ultimate outcome of a primary race in quite a while, but they do change some things. Biden pledged to have a woman VP during one of the 2020 debates, and even if he had already planned to do that before that debate, Harris' performance during the earlier debates certainly helped make her a major candidate for VP.

On the Republican side, there were several instances of candidates whose bids were effectively ended on the debate stage. In 2016, Chris Christie eviscerated Marco Rubio for his lack of governing experience and use of rehearsed lines, which completely killed any chance he had in NH after a pretty impressive performance in Iowa that year. Similarly, Rick Perry stopped being taken seriously in 2012 after he was unable to name which Cabinet departments he would eliminate.

As for improvements I would second the suggestions made by Open Source Intelligence, I think the biggest problem with debates today is that there's too much emphasis on theatrics when a debate should instead serve as a digest of all the candidates' opinions on various issues.

[Electric Circus]

Gearing to narrower audiences is a guaranteed way to irrelevance. The only "narrow audience" I ever see realistically occurring is one day you have a Spanish language debate, but even that would be controversial and draw cries of foul play due to the candidates that can't speak Spanish.

Improvements that can be made but won't:

1. No live audience. Just a moderator in a TV studio with the candidates.
2. Put them on a couple hour tape delay and remove the back-and-forth bullsh*t. Tell candidates ahead of time you will. Threaten candidates ahead of time that non-answers to questions get removed from the televised content. No one has the balls to do this however.

The core appeal of these events is that they are a brutal live spectacle. People tune in hoping to watch someone get disemboweled in real time. Remove the trash TV appeal, and most of the audience is gone.

Television is still a good way to reach many voters, but its relevance decreases with each passing election cycle. Events catered to narrower audiences will be more important because that will be the only way to reach a growing majority of voters.

Debates tailored to narrower audiences would not be the type of marquee events that single-handedly drive national media cycles. But that's not what they were until the era of national television broadcasts and a voting public that was tuned in to the narratives set by media figures with a captive nationwide audience. There are other ways to campaign.

[Open Source Intelligence]

Gearing to narrower audiences is a guaranteed way to irrelevance. The only "narrow audience" I ever see realistically occurring is one day you have a Spanish language debate, but even that would be controversial and draw cries of foul play due to the candidates that can't speak Spanish.

Improvements that can be made but won't:

1. No live audience. Just a moderator in a TV studio with the candidates.
2. Put them on a couple hour tape delay and remove the back-and-forth bullsh*t. Tell candidates ahead of time you will. Threaten candidates ahead of time that non-answers to questions get removed from the televised content. No one has the balls to do this however.

The core appeal of these events is that they are a brutal live spectacle. People tune in hoping to watch someone get disemboweled in real time. Remove the trash TV appeal, and most of the audience is gone.

What's the purpose of these debates? Provide trash TV or provide insight into who should be running the country after the next election?

Television is still a good way to reach many voters, but its relevance decreases with each passing election cycle. Events catered to narrower audiences will be more important because that will be the only way to reach a growing majority of voters.

What's the better alternative way though reaching the mainstream electorate? Don't say the internet. The internet is a good way to get a candidate from 1% to 5%. It can't get you to 50%. I've long felt people on the internet overestimate themselves and their reach and how many people out in the real world think like them because that's all they ever expose themselves to is their community. Exhibit A is this board.

Debates tailored to narrower audiences would not be the type of marquee events that single-handedly drive national media cycles. But that's not what they were until the era of national television broadcasts and a voting public that was tuned in to the narratives set by media figures with a captive nationwide audience. There are other ways to campaign.

If you're the frontrunner (in this cycle's instance, Trump and Biden) why expose yourself to the opportunity of providing a leg up to your competition? 2016 Hillary Clinton in this era would've never debated Bernie Sanders. I don't think we're even going to get general election debates. The RNC have voted unanimously they won't and it's in Biden's interests for him to not debate.

[Electric Circus]

[...]

The national committee is the sine qua non of the modern primary debate. Their goal is to promote the party they represent. There are better ways to learn about almost any candidate for office, and I say this as someone who has watched nearly every one of these debates for the past twenty years.

Almost all voters are online - and voters spend more time online than they do watching broadcast or cable television - but there isn't a good way to reach all of them. This is as true for paid advertising as it is for earned media. The internet contains multitudes: e-mail, various social media platforms, video streaming, podcasts, private discussion groups, and so on. Campaigns need to adapt to this fracturing. It's not just a matter of replacing television dollars with Facebook dollars, or of displacing an obsession with the drama of the Sunday morning shows with a similar obsession fixated on Twitter.

There are also less media-centric ways to conduct campaigns. There's a limit to what a candidate themselves can do without that amplification, but campaigns don't have to be as candidate-centric as they have been for most of our lifetimes.

Here is a recent piece that makes similar points, dubbing 2024 "the nowhere election." Here is another. That's what it has felt like to me. I know where to go to find out what people are saying in different media circles, but that's completely disconnected from most voters. Real, on-the-ground campaign reporting is thin, and there is no shared narrative for it to cohere with when you do encounter something substantive.

This is not an election that political obsessives can follow online in the same way as the last few. It's also less legible than earlier elections fought while everyone paying attention to the news was consuming information shaped by a few well-known, professionalized, mainstream outfits. National political media itself - on screen, in print, and as a social media phenomenon - is in decline. The illusion of a national conversation is over. That doesn't bode well for the future of debates as we know them.

[Open Source Intelligence]

[...]

The national committee is the sine qua non of the modern primary debate. Their goal is to promote the party they represent. There are better ways to learn about almost any candidate for office, and I say this as someone who has watched nearly every one of these debates for the past twenty years.

Almost all voters are online - and voters spend more time online than they do watching broadcast or cable television - but there isn't a good way to reach all of them. This is as true for paid advertising as it is for earned media. The internet contains multitudes: e-mail, various social media platforms, video streaming, podcasts, private discussion groups, and so on. Campaigns need to adapt to this fracturing. It's not just a matter of replacing television dollars with Facebook dollars, or of displacing an obsession with the drama of the Sunday morning shows with a similar obsession fixated on Twitter.

There are also less media-centric ways to conduct campaigns. There's a limit to what a candidate themselves can do without that amplification, but campaigns don't have to be as candidate-centric as they have been for most of our lifetimes.

Here is a recent piece that makes similar points, dubbing 2024 "the nowhere election." Here is another. That's what it has felt like to me. I know where to go to find out what people are saying in different media circles, but that's completely disconnected from most voters. Real, on-the-ground campaign reporting is thin, and there is no shared narrative for it to cohere with when you do encounter something substantive.

This is not an election that political obsessives can follow online in the same way as the last few. It's also less legible than earlier elections fought while everyone paying attention to the news was consuming information shaped by a few well-known, professionalized, mainstream outfits. National political media itself - on screen, in print, and as a social media phenomenon - is in decline. The illusion of a national conversation is over. That doesn't bode well for the future of debates as we know them.

The illusion of a national conversation is over, but where you fail is you think it's going to get replaced by something. There's just not going to be a conversation. I read Paul Wells a lot, he's a great Canadian political journalist now with his own Substack. He had a 4-part series earlier this year widely acclaimed in Canadian circles talking about the decline of traditional journalism (well-trodded fare) but then developed that into how our current era of politics we know pretty much nothing of what goes on in spite of the nassive growth of comms armies that have occurred. And that's by design because the Trudeau administration following the example of the Harper and Obama administrations and furthering it even more, say nothing. It's not in their interest to have anyone know what they're doing. Biden's administration we do know little about what goes on, especially in comparison to Trump that had a hundred anonymous sources.

That's governing. Campaigning is a different kettle of fish, but narrowcasting is not in the interest of campaigns. The interest of campaigns is to be everything to everyone, that way you can't make enemies in this era where special interests can dominate primaries and will find the imagined sleights with the more audio and video they have to look at.

The error you make is thinking this narrowcasting will be a credible replacement while I just see it means the powerbrokers will find the narrowcast they like or will not challenge them on certain points, and that becomes their one outlet. Who says if Trump becomes President again he only talks to Tucker Carlson? Why couldn't he? Hell, Obama every March had a 15-minute interview be filling out his bracket for March Madness on Sportscenter. I'm sure he'd rather done that than talked about Syria. George W. Bush's one serious long interview in 2008 was with Bob Costas - a sportscaster - during the Summer Olympics.

Link to the 4-part Paul Wells piece on "The End of Media". https://paulwells.substack.com/t/end-of-media

Excerpt from part 2:

These changes [OSINT: everyone having an iPhone or equivalent] made life hard for big news organizations and unpredictable for journalists. They still do. But their effect on journalism was probably less significant than their effect on the way every large organization thought about communicating.

Not only was the amount of information available to (just about) anyone (in rich countries) exploding, the amount of information anyone could produce was increasing on a comparable slope.

The result was the most overwhelming information glut in history. It’s still going on.

“Five exabytes (or five billion billion bytes) of data could store all the words ever spoken by humans between the birth of the world and 2003,” the Harvard Business School economist Bharat Anand wrote in his 2016 book The Content Trap. “In 2011, five exabytes of content were created every two days.”

This meant that anyone in the communications business was now shouting into a hurricane. “Compete in a world of four broadcast channels and you know what you’re up against,” Anand wrote. “Compete against 900 channels, millions of short-form videos, and the rerelease of an entire library of video archives — including your own — and it’s a strategic and marketing nightmare even to make consumers aware of what you’re producing. Let’s call this ‘the problem of getting noticed.’”

In Ottawa a decade ago it was easy to get the feeling that if a government was clamping down on the flow of information, ostracizing big news organizations, intimidating their sources, and pushing out self-regard through novel channels beyond the reach of the pundits’ guild, it was because Stephen Harper was a jerk.

Yet Harper’s presence wasn’t a necessary ingredient for such behaviour.

In October 2013 the Committee to Protect Journalists, a Washington NGO, published a report by Leonard Downie Jr., a former Washington Post executive editor, about Barack Obama’s relationship with journalists. Its opening sentences:

“U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press.”

The main issue that led the CPJ to contract Downie’s services was peculiar to the U.S. national-security state, and not easily comparable to any situation in Canada at the time. Especially in the years following 9/11, the giant U.S. defence and intelligence apparatus was subject to intense journalistic scrutiny. This could lead to embarrassing news stories and worse. Obama’s White House zealously hunted and prosecuted suspected leakers.

But while he was investigating that story, Downie heard more generally from Washington reporters about the Obama White House’s controlling attitude toward reporting. Even reporting on the routine business of government. This was new.

“Designated administration spokesmen are often unresponsive or hostile to press inquiries,” he wrote, “even when reporters have been sent to them by officials who won’t talk on their own.” He quoted David E. Sanger, who began covering Washington for the New York Times during the Reagan administration: “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

Who was the president meeting? Who was advising him today? Where did they sit at the beginning of meetings? White House reporters were used to being told this stuff, and even seeing it briefly with their own eyes. No more.

Worse still, while the White House veterans were cooling their heels or getting the cold shoulder from longtime sources who were suddenly too leery of leak investigations to dish, Obama wasn’t even hiding. He was talking, all right, but to… heathen. Outsiders. Unaccredited yokels. Bloggers and Youtubers and some sports guy and Michael Lewis and, sometimes it seemed, just about anybody except the people who were paid to sit in Washington and know what was going on and think up the question that might have a chance of squeezing a drop of sweat from the coolest brow in politics.

In Ottawa, Harper’s staff was experimenting with printing slogans on door hangers and stickers on gas-station pumps. Any method for getting their message to people the newspapers and evening news didn’t reach. Digital platforms were a logical next step. In Washington, Downie wrote, the White House “has notably used social media, videos, and its own sophisticated websites to provide the public with administration-generated information about its activities.”

In Toronto, in 2007, a former CBC news-network anchor named Ben Chin recorded videos in which he looked and acted like a TV anchor, except that now he was an employee of Ontario’s Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty. In Washington a few years later, Obama’s staff refined and extended such techniques. The new social-media platforms gave them a range of new options.

Perhaps the keenest students of Obama’s new communications techniques were Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, the founders of a new online news operation, Politico. They told Downie:

“One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is government creation of content—photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides—which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forum, not just for campaigning, but governing.”

It got to where the White House even produced its own newscast-style… thing… called West Wing Week. The “show” sometimes featured video of events the actual accredited TV crews from actual news organizations hadn’t been allowed to see. Sometimes events they hadn’t even been told about.

To the charge of using powerful new tools to get past the gatekeepers, the Obamaites cheerfully pled guilty. “There are new means available to us because of changes in the media,” a senior White House source told Downie. “And we’d be guilty of malpractice if we didn’t use them.”

Modern politics is wired so that, because I’ve mentioned Stephen Harper and Barack Obama in the same post, many of you will now set about debating which was worse and which was heroic. Choose your fighter, fill your boots. But please consider this: the one you admire acted a lot like the one you don’t, because both were responding rationally to a tech-driven social upheaval.