Proliferation & Presidential Debates

The number of Republican candidates exploded by 2x in 2016, over 3x for Dems in 2020.

Collegiate debate is something I fell into by accident. My plan was to walk on to the Air Force Academy soccer team, but apparently that was the plan of two hundred or so classmates. I quickly realized ten minutes into the first practice that the only way to escape campus was to find another activity, and pronto. I got lucky, and found that my love of watching the presidential debates in 1980 and 1984 translated well into the actual sport of argument. Thanks to my fellow debate newbie, Steve Kiser, we had a pretty good run around the Western CEDA circuit from 1986 until our graduation and swan song in early 1990. Like me, Steve hadn’t ever debated before college (He “rassled” in high school), but our mix of slow-talking goofballery somehow got us into the top national rankings and more trophies than I could afford to pack up after graduation.

As my technical debate skills rose, the quality of presidential debating fell. The quality has gotten much worse ever since. I think it’s fair to say that America has seen its presidential debates - particularly the primary debates - go straight to hell:

Twenty candidates on stage all talking at once. Moderators making themselves the center of attention, not to mention judge and jury. Gotcha questions. Interruptions. And as more and more candidates were packed on the same stage, the amount of time and attention allocated for each response was made briefer and shallower.

We all noticed in 2016 that participants were given radically uneven amounts of speaking time by the network honchos. Participants figured out that they had to resort to shouting to get attention, or get left behind. The only announced rule was that you could respond if another candidate said your name. That’s not a rule, it’s a recipe for unfairness! And on cue, moderators asked loaded questions along the lines of, “Governor Kasich, do you think Donald Trump is electable?” Who can forget Ben Carson asking, “Will somebody please attack me?”

Ted Cruz rightly took the whole charade to task at one point in 2015, saying “This is not a cage match!” It finally got bad enough that this January, the Republican Party formally quit the institution that was in theory managing the process, and is now actively preparing for a better alternative to choose its 2024 nominee.

How did it happen? Why did it happen?

I’ve identified seven trends that made presidential debates worse over the past three decades. One of the worst trends is Candidate Proliferation, which really became a problem in the past two cycles.

Historically, six to eight candidates threw their hat in the ring for their party’s nomination. Televised debates were held in January of the election year. That taboo was broken in 1988, when television stations began sponsoring debates during the summer prior (e.g., 1987). Over the many debates, the number of candidates was narrowed to five, four, and rarely, just two.

To help think about how badly proliferation has gotten, I checked the maximum number of candidates in the first debate each cycle. From 1968 to 2012, Democrats typically had six candidates seeking the nomination. Republicans allowed an average of eight presidential candidates on stage, or 7.7 to be exact. Then in 2016, the number of “serious” Republican candidates at a single debate ballooned to 17. That is a ridiculous amount. But Democrats topped that with 20 candidates in the 2020 cycle, and not just once but multiple times.

This is the kind of phenomenon that is embarrassing to explain to children because even a child knows that a discussion among more than seven people is really just chaos. Every additional participant lowers the educational quality and informational coherence of the “debate.” Somehow, we let it happen anyway. I don’t think the media overlords mind the chaos, so long as viewers tune in, but I don’t think they are directly to blame.

“Why the proliferation?” asks Robert Litan, a longtime scholar at the Brookings Institution and veteran college debater who recently brainstormed the issue with me. (Litan, by the way, published a book on the power of debate as an educational technique in public schools that you should read. It’s called Resolved).

One cause is undoubtedly the rise of small-p populism. Litan speculates that in a world of backroom deals, party bosses were able to weed out weaker, fringier candidates. The most recent push for more “democracy” was the Democratic Party squabble over superdelegates. Similar efforts going back decades have “opened the process” up, which translates into hardline party voters having more control and elites having less. Could there be a downside to the trend toward more democracy inside a party? Maybe so if it means that more extreme voters pull the nomination process away from the center. On the one hand, more candidates is more fair because it allows in more voices. That’s nice in theory, but this isn’t a choir.

Party bosses care about electability. Activists don’t.

A proliferation of candidates sounds a lot like screaming, crosstalk madness. And that’s not democratic. That’s a mob.

( To be continued. Please - send me your thoughts. Is this something we can fix?)