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The presidential debate deal announced Wednesday may be good for the two candidates (they wouldn’t have agreed to it if it weren’t) — and might even be good for voters.
It won’t be good for one Virginia school. Virginia State University had been picked by the Commission on Presidential Debates as a site for one of three presidential debates this fall.
Instead, the campaigns of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump decided to bypass the commission and agree to two debates, each handled by a major television network. The Republican National Committee voted two years ago to withdraw its support for the debate commission, believing it was biased against the party’s candidates (even though one of the commission’s co-chairs is a former chair of the RNC). What’s new here is that the Democrats have now ditched the commission as well. The Biden campaign said that the commission’s proposed schedule was “out of step with changes in the structure of our elections” — more on that shortly — and that the commission had done a poor job in the past of enforcing debate rules.
What’s really a surprise here is the unprecedented early timing — the first debate will be June 27 on CNN, the second Sept. 10 on ABC.
Presidential politics are generally an area I stay away from, but this decision does have some Virginia context. So let’s explore it.
Virginia State University misses a shot at history
If the commission-sponsored debates had gone forward, Virginia State would have been the first historically Black college or university to host a presidential debate. As such, it will now lose out on the national attention that would have shone on the school.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, called skipping Virginia State “a huge mistake” and noted that VSU had been raising money for debate-related programming. The two state legislators whose districts include VSU — state Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield County, and Del. Mike Cherry, R-Colonial Heights — both released a letter to Biden asking him to reconsider.
Skipping VSU is unfortunate, because the nation’s HBCUs have long been an afterthought — and both candidates have talking points they could have employed to highlight what they’ve done for HBCUs.
The Biden administration issued a fact sheet last year that said the current administration had invested more than $7 billion in HBCUs (although about half that came in the form of COVID relief), which included $1.7 billion in grants “to expand academic capacity and provide support for low-income students,” and $1.6 billion in debt relief.
When Trump was president, he claimed: “I saved HBCUs. They were going out. They were going out and we saved them.” Inside Higher Education says that wasn’t true, but that Trump did deserve credit for signing into law the Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act, or the FUTURE Act, which “made permanent $255 million in annual STEM funding for minority-serving colleges, including roughly $85 million specifically allocated to HBCUs.” That wasn’t an administration initiative, though; the bill was sponsored by a Democratic congressman from North Carolina (but it did have broad bipartisan support). The Trump administration did cancel more than $300 million in federal relief loans that four HBCUs owed after damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
The early debate schedule reflects a new reality
The two debates agreed upon will be the earliest presidential debates ever. The last one will be done before other presidential debates ever began. Historically, the first debates have come in late September (until now, Sept. 21, in 1980, was the earliest) or early October. In 1992, the first debate didn’t come until Oct. 11.
The new reality here isn’t simply that the two candidates are known long before the conventions — that’s happened before — but that people are voting earlier.
We no longer have an Election Day, we have an Election Autumn. Some Republicans really hate this — Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford County, introduced a bill this year that would have eliminated what is technically called “no excuses absentee voting,” but it died on an 8-0 vote in committee. Americans love convenience, though, and early voting is convenient. All but three states — Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire — now have some form of early voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In 2020, only 30.4% of the ballots were cast on the traditional Election Day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and USA Facts.
The pandemic skewed voting patterns that year, but early voting was surging even before that. In the 2018 congressional midterms, only 59.6% of votes were cast on Election Day — meaning 40.4% were not.
Interestingly, even in 2020, the places most enthusiastic about early voting were Republican ones. Western states had the lowest percentage of in-person ballots that year — only 10.1% — but many Western states have gone to voting-by-mail as their main way to collect ballots, so I’m inclined to drop those stats. However, in the South — now one of the most Republican parts of the country — only 29.2% voted on Election Day. Meanwhile, in the Democratic-dominated Northeast, 45% of the ballots were still cast on Election Day.
I’ve pointed out before that in Virginia, Republicans have benefited from early voting — Glenn Youngkin pushed it hard in 2021, which no doubt helped him win — and have the potential to benefit even more if they can use early voting to boost low turnout numbers in some rural localities, particularly in Southwest Virginia. Republicans who push to eliminate or restrict early voting are actually hurting their own party’s electoral interests in Virginia.
In any case, the Sept. 10 date for the final Biden-Trump debate reflects this new voting landscape.
Six days later, Pennsylvania, a key swing state, starts accepting applications for civilian absentee and mail-in ballots. Some parts of Pennsylvania might even start earlier. The state’s website says, “A county board of election may begin to process applications earlier if it deems it appropriate.”
Three states — Democratic-leaning Minnesota and Virginia and strongly Republican South Dakota — are scheduled to start early voting on Sept. 20. By early October, some other key swing states will be voting — Arizona starts on Oct. 9. All this has changed the way campaigns approach elections; the early debate dates are the most visible recognition of that.
Another byproduct of early voting: The impact of an “October Surprise” is lessened, because in some places, most of the votes may already be cast by then.
Finally, this is a good reminder that early voting is currently underway in the June 18 primaries; for details on who’s running for what, see our voter guide. Also, I’ll have more to say about the early voting trends in those primaries in this week’s West of the Capital, our free weekly political newsletter that goes out each Friday at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters on our newsletter page.
Enforcing debate rules is hard
Democrats complained that the debate commission had done a poor job enforcing rules in the past. To quote a certain former Democratic president, I feel your pain.
I’ve been on debate panels; I’ve moderated debates (not presidential ones, obviously). It’s harder than it looks. Candidates are not on stage to speak to the moderator; they’re on stage to speak to the audience, in the room or beyond. There is little incentive for them to adhere to the rules if they have a point they want to make. The moderator can always call out an offending candidate or try to cut the candidate off, but the risk is it looks like the moderator is siding with the other candidate. Think of this in sports terms: If the ref blows the whistle on the other side, he’s always right; if he does it to your side, he’s not just wrong, he’s biased — and yelling at refs has a long tradition.
Some consumer advice on polls
I feel like I write this same consumer advisory every four years. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday declared the presidential race to be “a dead heat.” This is only partially true. It may be true that the poll found 40% backing each candidate. However, that’s not how we elect presidents. We elect them state by state. By that measure — which is the one that really counts — Trump is probably ahead. The latest polls show him with a 3%-4% lead in Pennsylvania, a 6%-9% lead in Arizona, an 8%-10% lead in Georgia, a 12%-14% lead in Nevada — all states that Biden carried four years ago. Other polls show mixed results, with much closer margins, in Michigan and Wisconsin, two more Biden states from 2020. If the election were held today, Trump would win; and while the popular vote might be close, the Electoral College would not be.
Given these numbers, it’s in Biden’s interest to have an early debate, in hopes of turning things around. Trump may not have really expanded his support from four years ago. But Biden’s base is unenthusiastic, and he needs to do something to change that. The risk, of course, is that he performs poorly, and that it further cements an impression in the public’s mind that he’s not up to the job. Remember Biden’s high-energy State of the Union Address? I’d expect that in June, only more so.
As a general rule, my advice is this: Ignore all these polls. We used to say the one that really matters is on Election Day. Now the one that really matters will play out over several election weeks.