By: John C. Wohlstetter
The Trump-Harris debate—with 67 million viewers, the most watched in 16 years—was a 3-on-1 travesty. Megyn Kelly’s take (4:34) on the moderators shows extreme moderator anti-Republican bias, so ingrained that drastic measures must be taken. There are preliminary indications that Trump may have picked up undecided voter support, but even if so, reform is urgently needed. There are fixes at hand, but getting the Democrats to agree requires that Trump wins the election, as they benefit from today’s bias.
Truly Neutral Rules: (1) candidates and their campaign staffs prepare questions for the opposing candidate(s); (2) each side decides which topics to raise; (3) questions are limited to 30 seconds, to prevent candidates from making speeches disguised as questions; (4) candidates fact-check each other; (5) moderators are time-keepers only, cutting off mics when each time segment expires; (6) keep the new practice of no in-studio audiences.
My views come primarily from my years of watching debates—until, after the first presidential debate in 2016, I soured on watching live contests.
At age 13, I watched the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. One lesson learned was that appearances do matter: JFK was move-star handsome, well-dressed—he was told that light blue shirt and makeup would work well with he black-and-white TVs of the time—and exuded charisma and charm. Alas for Nixon, he was on the wrong side of all three; his post-shaving five-o’clock shadow showed up by lunchtime. Viewers gave JFK the edge, while radio listeners thought Nixon won.
There were no debates in 1964, 1968 and 1972. In 1968, a very close election, the outcome might have been different had the charismatic RFK, tragically assassinated and not saddled with Vietnam, been the Democratic candidate; RFK could well have swayed enough voters. Debates might have have had to include George Wallace, whose 10 million voters delivered five states and 46 electoral votes in the still solidly Democratic South. Epic landslides made debates irrelevant in 1964 and 1972.
Came 1976, and debates were revived. The GOP tickets introduced a new feature that factored in some debates: the catastrophic gaffe. In the vice-presidential debate, Senator Dole, a genuine war hero, crippled while trying to help a comrade, called the two world wars, plus the Korean and Vietnam conflicts “Democrat wars” (0:46)—adding that the total killed and wounded came to 1.6 million, equal to the population of Detroit. President Ford, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, said in response to stellar NY Times foreign correspondent Max Frankel, asking about Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, that their populations did not see themselves dominated by the Soviets; given a change to retract, Ford repeated his view. He was belatedly vindicated on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
In 1980 the race was roughly dead even going into the final week. President Carter and Reagan met alone that might (Independent John Anderson had participated in the first debate, a month earlier). That night, Reagan closed by asking voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He cited Carter’s stagflation economy, and serial retreat abroad, The race margin held through the workweek, but over Saturday, Sunday and Monday, the numbers tipped decisively to Reagan, who won on the issues foremost in voters’ minds.
In 1984, Reagan won in a monster landslide. His debate with Carter’s former vice-president, Walter Mondale, decided little. Reagan had faded at the end of the first debate. This led a journalist to ask Reagan, who was to turn 73 shortly after Inauguration Day 1985, if his age should be an issue.
Reagan answered (0:45), looking at Mondale, then 56, that he promised not to use his opponent’s “youth and inexperience” against him. The audience roared, and Mondale, always a good sport, laughed.
In 1988, Bush handily defeated a weak Democrat, former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The year’s noteworthy debate moment came when vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, who had served in the Congress Senate with JFK, pounced (0:49) on Dan Quayle’s citing having had as much experience in Congress as did JFK when he ran for president. To which Bentsen delivered a zinger: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy!” The audience, packed with Democrats, erupted.
In the next five quadrennial debates, only one produced a truly noteworthy moment. The 1992 debates produced no fireworks, and were a veritable three-ring circus. In 1996, 2004, and 2008, ditto. But 2000 produced one extraordinary episode, that may well have cost then-vice president Al Gore the White House, given the razor-thin final margin. (Officially, Bush 43 won Florida, and the Electoral College majority, by only 537 votes in a protracted recount.) In one of the debates, Gore wandered over to Bush, physically invading his personal space (0:17) on stage, a major breach of debate etiquette.
In 2012 there was a new element introduced: moderator fact-checking. CNN moderator Candy Crowley fact-checked Mitt Romney on what Obama said about the murder by Arab terrorists of three special ops defenders guarding our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where then-U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stephens, also perished. Crowley fact-check was, alas, not fully factual. In the event,Obama was handily re-elected.
In 2016, I watched the first debate only, and was disgusted as the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, interceded on Hillary’s behalf after her dismal showing in the first thirty minutes. That did it for me and suffering through debates, praying that my preferred candidate wouldn’t make a fatal gaffe. In 2020, it is generally conceded that Trump’s constant interrupting of Joe Biden cost him the win. Lest Trump do better a second time, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) used Trump’s recent recovery from Covid as an excuse to deny him a second debate. As if the candidates could not have been in separate booths, socially distant. The GOP co-chair of the CPD called (4:01) the performance of the ABC moderators the worst he’d ever seen in the 33 debates he’d run as CPD co-chair, from 1988 through 2020. (In 2024, Biden rejected CPD debate sponsorship.)
True, no amount of reform can nullify advantages of looks, charm, charisma. And sheer luck can play a role. But lots can—and should—be done to minimize bias and caprice. The voters—for whose benefit political debates are presumably aired—deserve maximum transparency.
Bottom Line. An earlier generation of moderators tried to be fair: Their biases—impossible for anyone to completely eliminate—never decided a debate. Today’s generation of pseudo-journalists that moderate political debates are overwhelmingly—about 90 percent—ardently pro-Democrat. Reforming debate rules would enable voters to better appraise candidates.
John C. Wohlstetter is the author of Presidential Succession: Constitution, Congress and National Security (Gold Institute Press, 2024)
