Spin Control: October means candidate ‘debates’ are coming up

Although candidates have been campaigning in earnest for months, Sunday marks a key point in the election cycle, the start of serious debates.

Before October, candidates have appeared at various forums and clashed on various policies or ideas, but many voters haven’t been paying much attention. By the end of October, there’s not much point in debating, because many ballots have been sent, most voters’ minds are made up and the undecided become less so by watching two candidates standing at podiums on a stage.

That’s why The Spokesman-Review and other organizations schedule their debates for October, hoping to give voters a glimpse of the people they’re being asked to hire to manage their city, county, state or country.

But as someone who has at times organized, moderated and served as a questioner in debates, there are several things voters should know about them.

Organizers often begin planning for debates in the spring, although they usually don’t issue formal invitations with a time, date and venue until after the primary has whittled the field down to two. An incumbent front-runner rarely wants to devote the time to a debate preprimary, and even perennial challengers who are likely to finish nowhere near the top two will complain about being left out.

Events before the primary with a large cast of characters are so far from a real debate because the challenge of getting would-be office holders to answer complicated questions increases exponentially with the number of candidates on the stage.

The recent Republican presidential nomination “debates” have been perfect examples, being mostly free-for-alls in which candidates compete to talk well beyond their time limits or try to score points by interrupting each other, then seem aggrieved when someone else interrupts them. In the news business, we often call these “cattle calls,” although it seems disrespectful to cows.

Organizers also begin planning months in advance because they have to negotiate with the campaigns certain details, such as a date when both candidates are available. The easiest way to duck a debate is for a candidate to claim that they would LOVE to accept the invitation but have a previous commitment. In some cases, they will have something else scheduled no matter what day the organizers suggest.

Some candidates love to debate; other candidates hate it. Refusing all debates should be a red flag for voters, but complaining that your opponent will only debate three times when you want to debate nine suggests a lack of seriousness.

Once both candidates accept an invitation, there is often a negotiation over the format, such as how long the answer to each question should be; if there’s a rebuttal, how long will that be; and will the original answerer get to rebut the rebuttal. Who will be on the panel of questioners, and whether the candidates will be able to ask each other a question, also are frequently up for negotiation.

Although the campaigns agree to the format, the candidates rarely stick to it.

Once the candidates commit and the event is scheduled, there’s one important thing for voters to remember. They are not debates in any real sense of the word.

They aren’t like competitive high school or college debates, where the topic is given and the debaters are scored on content, style and strategy. There is no scoring to determine a winner, and each candidate’s campaign will claim he or she won, usually in a news release written before the debate started.

They aren’t like congressional or parliamentary debates, where a presiding officer can rule a person out of order for straying off the topic. Asked a question about property taxes, a candidate might fill their allotted minute or two with a discussion about potholes or homelessness. A moderator’s attempt at the end of the time limit to force an answer about property taxes might result in another 30 seconds on inflation or parking meters.

Any candidate who compares them to the Lincoln-Douglas debates was probably sleeping in high school history. In those matchups, one candidate spoke for an hour, the second candidate spoke for 90 minutes to rebut, and the first candidate then got 30 minutes to rebut the rebuttal. Probably good for filling an evening in 1858, but not likely to keep the average voter on the edge of their seat in 2023.

What they really are is joint news conferences featuring two people who disagree on certain issues and who, after months of campaigning, don’t much like each other but by now can anticipate what each other will say. They likely have rehearsed certain points their campaigns want them to get across, and will often fit the square peg of an answer into the round hole of a question.

Above all, a smart campaign has drilled into the candidate the most important thing about that hour or two: Don’t screw up.

This isn’t to suggest that candidate debates are of no value. They give a voter the chance to see the candidates in action and possibly compare their answers to questions that might be a big concern.

They can be informative or fun to watch. They might help a voter pick a candidate. But they rarely decide an election.