One of the few things I hate about covering politics is writing about the inevitable debate over debates. This column is about the debate over debates.
The immediate question is whether there will be any debates in the 6th District congressional race between Republican incumbent Ben Cline and Democratic challenger Beth Macy.
Maybe. Maybe not.
First, let’s walk through the undisputed chain of events, then we’ll get to the parts in dispute.
Macy challenged Cline to three debates: one in the Roanoke Valley, one in the central Shenandoah Valley, one in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Cline accepted.
Whether prompted by that, or just as a matter of course, some groups offered to host debates. One of those was Roanoke College, which approached Cardinal News to see if we were interested in partnering. We were, as long as the college handled the logistical details. Our role was to send out the invite. Macy accepted; we never heard from Cline.
On Monday, Cline announced three debates he had accepted: before the Salem Rotary Club, the Harrisonburg Rotary Club and the Small Business Freedom Alliance in Frederick County. “I appreciate these opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with voters about the issues that matter most in their daily lives,” Cline said in a statement.
Macy’s campaign responded that she was never consulted about any of these, that they appear to be “forums” and not true debates. “I challenged Rep. Cline to three debates, and I awaited his response to work together to come up with a list of dates and venues,” Macy said in a statement. “He didn’t respond directly. Instead, he issued a blanket announcement of his preferred slate of candidate forums — not actual debates — that amounts to a chicken-you-know-what response. He doesn’t want to debate. A Virginia news organization invited us both to appear at a debate it planned to host, but he failed to reply, for fear of, you know, actually having to debate me. I look forward to working with the Cline team on actually scheduling real debates, in good faith. Rep. Cline doesn’t get to make the rules.”
On Tuesday, Macy’s campaign said the Frederick County date didn’t work, but was considering the two Rotary invitations. For its part, Cline’s campaign hit back at her contention that these were “phony” debates, suggesting that Macy had denigrated service clubs. (You can see all the back-and-forth in the box accompanying this column.)
How the debate over debates unfolded
Monday: Cline sends out a release with the subject line “Cline announces 2026 debate schedule.”
Cline: “I appreciate these opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with voters about the issues that matter most in their daily lives. Since my election in 2018, I have fought in Congress for the citizens of the Sixth District to defend their constitutional rights, advance their economic security, and keep their communities safe. I will continue to stand up for our shared conservative values and make sure the voices of the Sixth District are heard in Washington. I look forward to making that case to voters and advancing solutions that will continue American greatness for another 250 years.”
Monday: In response, Macy sends out a release with the subject line: “Cline’s phony debate schedule.”
Macy: I challenged Rep. Cline to three debates, and I awaited his response to work together to come up with a list of dates and venues. He didn’t respond directly. Instead, he issued a blanket announcement of his preferred slate of candidate forums — not actual debates — that amounts to a chicken-you-know-what response. He doesn’t want to debate. A Virginia news organization invited us both to appear at a debate it planned to host, but he failed to reply, for fear of, you know, actually having to debate me. I look forward to working with the Cline team on actually scheduling real debates, in good faith. Rep. Cline doesn’t get to make the rules.
Tuesday: Cline sends out a release with the subject line: “Cline’s Democrat Opponent Calls Local Service Clubs ‘Phony.'”
Cline: “Whether Rotary, Ruritan, Lions, Kiwanis, or any of the other many service clubs at work throughout the district, these organizations play a critical role serving those in need, strengthening communities, and supporting important charitable causes. It is unfortunate that my opponent thinks these groups are not legitimate organizations or capable of successfully sponsoring important events to inform their respective communities.
“My opponent challenged me to three debates, which now appears to be little more than a messaging ploy. I have always been committed to debating my opponents, accepting and participating in several events during each of my campaigns. Apparently my opponent’s intention was to play political games, because if she were serious about debating me, she would have accepted the same three invitations that I did.
“I hope my opponent reconsiders her poor treatment of our community leaders and accepts their invitations to engage in meaningful conversations with voters about the issues that matter to them.”
For now, that’s where we stand: A debate requires both candidates to agree and so far we don’t have both candidates agreeing. But we sure do have them debating over debates, which ultimately is a distraction from whatever issues you, the voters, think are important.
I have multiple hats to wear here. I have just put on my reporter’s fedora to deliver a “just the facts, ma’am” account. As Cardinal’s founding editor, I put on my Cardinal hat (you can buy your own in our merch store!) and wish Cline had agreed to the Roanoke College-Cardinal proposal because it’s important for candidates to be questioned and for as many voters as possible to hear their answers. As a longtime political analyst, I will keep my Cardinal hat, just at a different angle and with some sweat on the headband, to explain the nitty gritty politics at play here.
In almost every campaign, there’s a candidate who will benefit from a debate and one who won’t. Typically, it’s the challenger who has the most to gain and the incumbent who sees little to gain and potentially something to lose. That’s certainly the case here. As a matter of political practice, Cline was clever to accept Macy’s challenge — and then unilaterally announce the debates (maybe “debates,” but we’ll get to that) that he has accepted. By agreeing to three — three more than most incumbents want to do — and then defining which ones he’s accepted, he gets to blunt an attack and position himself as the one who wants to debate. This is political chess.
Macy, in her statement, said “Rep. Cline doesn’t get to make the rules.” Except he kind of does. It takes two to tango and two to debate, so there’s no debate without both of them. Republicans will admire Cline’s gamesmanship, Democrats will deride it, but there’s no partisanship here to Cline’s tactics.
This is exactly what U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., did back in June 2024. He unilaterally announced three debates he had accepted and left it to the Republican challenger, Hung Cao, to come to him. In the end, there was just one debate.
Likewise, last year, Democrat Abigail Spanberger was riding high in the polls and saw little to be gained from debating her Republican opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears. Spanberger last year passed on a debate invitation from Appalachian School of Law/Appalachia PBS/Cardinal News to debate in Southwest Virginia and instead agreed to what her campaign no doubt felt was a friendlier venue at Norfolk State University.
Is any of this pretty? Or noble? Or idealistic? Of course not. It’s definitely not how things get explained in a school civics textbook, but it is how the world works, for better or for worse. Until someone figures out how to mandate debates and not run afoul of the constitution, debates are always going to be subject to debate.
Cline was also politically astute in his choice of which offers he accepted. Macy says some, maybe all of these, aren’t really debates, they’re forums where the candidates stand side by side to answer questions. No rules for these appearances were announced, so we really don’t know. However, this gets us into the details of what constitutes a debate. If we go back in time, the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates would be unrecognizable as debates today. Each one lasted three hours. They also didn’t take questions. One candidate spoke for an hour, then the other spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate got a 30-minute response. These seem more like back-to-back speeches to me, but they’ve gone down in history anyway because they were unique and important at the time. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, then both competing for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, also debated seven times. In front of live, unpredictable audiences that included hecklers. Sometimes these days it’s hard to get candidates to agree to one (see the examples above), but perhaps candidates then were made of sterner stuff.
While nobody debates like that anyway, the Lincoln-Douglas debates highlight something that very much remains present with us today: the role of miscalculation. Douglas was the incumbent, but Lincoln’s popularity was rising. Douglas felt the best way to deal with the upstart was to embarrass him in a series of debates. That did not happen. Douglas won that year’s election, to be sure (which then was a vote of the state legislature, not a popular vote), but Lincoln’s name recognition soared nationwide and the rest, as they say, is history. The reason why incumbents/frontrunners don’t like to debate today can be traced back to that. Why elevate the other side in the public mind? And there is, of course, always the prospect of a gaffe.
Cline notably agreed to events that have no provision (at least not yet) for live television or streaming coverage. Without that, most voters only get to see the encounter indirectly, through brief clips on the television news or written accounts. The Roanoke College-Cardinal debate offer did not get into the details but, historically, when we’ve hosted a debate we’ve tried to livestream it.
As a journalist, I must confess that debates usually don’t do much to really probe candidates on key issues. Candidates are too good at reciting their sound bites and avoiding the question. My idea of a perfect debate format would be a variation of the old game “20 questions.” I’d pick 20 questions and stage 20 events, where the candidates would have to spend the whole time digging into the details. I don’t get to make the rules, though, and no candidate would ever agree to such a thing. Instead we have the pale imitation that we’ve come to see in most televised campaign debates: Somebody asks a question, the candidate has a short time to answer (reciting their rehearsed lines), then the other candidate does the same.
There’s not much value in that if you’re looking for details but most voters aren’t looking for details.
As much as it pains me to write this, most people don’t pay much attention to politics. People are busy living their lives. They understand it’s important to vote, but it’s also important to pay the bills, get the kids to soccer practice, and maybe pick up an extra shift at work to pay those aforementioned bills.
Those voters just want to get some sense of who these candidates are and where they stand. The true value of a debate — and by this I mean something televised or livestreamed or otherwise broadcast — is that they create an event that becomes a kind of one-stop shopping point for busy voters.
Meanwhile, in other districts
In the 9th District, Democrat Joy Powers has challenged Republican incumbent Morgan Griffith to three debates. Griffith has not responded.
No word on any debates in the 5th District, either.
Candidates can debate in person 20 times, 200 times, but if the only people who hear it are in the room, that doesn’t really accomplish very much in terms of educating voters in a congressional district with 547,564 registered voters. Only something where people can actually see the event can accomplish that.
One value of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is that lots of people saw them. Their smallest crowd, in Jonesboro, Illinois, drew 1,500 spectators, still staggering by today’s standards. Anywhere from 16,000 to 20,000 people saw their encounter in Galesburg, Illinois. In all, maybe 70,000 people witnessed one of the debates. If all those were registered voters (and they probably weren’t), then 20.6% of Illinois voters saw Lincoln and Douglas debate the issues of the day. To achieve that same percentage today, we’d need the Cline-Macy debates to be viewed by 112,798 people. Can any debate today achieve that kind of scale if it’s not broadcast?
Many of Lincoln-Douglas debates took place at fairgrounds. To replicate that, Cline and Macy could hit the Page Valley Fair that’s underway this week, with upcoming fairs in Highland County, Shenandoah County and Rockbridge County. Take your pick: the demolition derby or the political debate. Or, short of that, maybe we can at least get whatever debates we have livestreamed; Facebook is sort of the fairgrounds of its day.
Even when candidates do debate today, voters don’t get the three hours’ worth of political discourse that Illinois voters got in 1858. Sometimes, they may not get much of anything. We are currently in the process of putting together our annual Voter Guide. We’ve sent the same 15 questions to all the candidates for U.S. House and Senate in Virginia. So far we’ve heard from multiple challengers, from both parties, but we’ve only heard from one incumbent. If incumbents can’t be bothered to give a written response to pretty simple questions, how likely are any of them going to be to stand on a stage and answer a question they may not be prepared for?
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Candidates, there’s still time to respond! We’ve sent the link to the questionnaire to the email address your campaign has on file with the Department of Elections. If you need another email address authorized, let me know. We’re currently updating our Voter Guide for the fall campaign and hope to have it ready in early September.
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