What Are Presidential Debates For?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Though their influence on voters seems to be between negligible and nonexistent, presidential debates are still important. And even if their past performances were sometimes hard to watch, it’s good for democracy that Trump and Biden will meet on stage this election cycle. But these debates will be a little different this time…
Guest: Alan Schroeder, Professor Emeritus at the Northeastern University School of Journalism with a focus on presidential elections, author of Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alan Schroederer may be an expert on presidential debates, but he found out the same way you did, that President Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be going toe to toe in two nationally televised sparring sessions this year. |
| 0:20.0 | Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. |
| 0:22.6 | He caught Biden's video. |
| 0:24.3 | Now he's acting like he wants to debate me again. |
| 0:26.6 | Well, make my day, pal. |
| 0:28.3 | I'll even do it. |
| 0:29.3 | The video, you know, I almost wish he hadn't done it. |
| 0:34.3 | This video dropped on Wednesday morning. |
| 0:38.8 | I didn't think it was a particularly dignified way to do this, but hey, what can I say? I'm old school. |
| 0:45.0 | You think he looked goofy? |
| 0:46.3 | Yeah, I didn't think it was necessary. |
| 0:49.6 | One thing that surprised Alan about the way all this went down was the speed of it. |
| 0:55.0 | Within hours there was a whole plan in place. |
| 0:58.0 | First a debate on CNN in June, then another in September on ABC. |
| 1:03.0 | And these debates, they were arranged by the campaigns themselves, |
| 1:07.0 | snubbing the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates entirely. |
| 1:12.0 | Before last week, |
| 1:14.0 | Biden hadn't committed to any debates. |
| 1:17.0 | There had even been people who thought maybe, this year, |
| 1:20.0 | the candidates would simply skip debating altogether. |
| 1:24.0 | For the record, Alan was not one of those people. |
| 1:27.3 | I've always thought that there would be at least one for the following reason |
... |
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