(Bloomberg Opinion) --
It’s time for the parties to take over their own debates.
Tuesday night’s debate was universally panned. Political scientist Seth Masket got it exactly right: “Sometimes I see a lot of people complaining about a #DemDebate when I actually enjoyed it. This is not one of those times.”
Before getting to that? Yes, the candidates debated. They shouted over each other a lot. Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg spent a lot of time under attack; neither was as bad as Bloomberg had been in the previous debate, but my guess is that neither really helped himself, either. (Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Joe Biden probably had his strongest debate performance. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were fine, but neither seems to have found a path to the nomination. Elizabeth Warren was pretty good, but it’s hard to see how she gets there, either, unless she’s been boosted from last week’s debate in a way that hasn’t shown up in the polls yet. And Tom Steyer was back, chewing up time that could have gone to more serious candidates.
Indeed, the first problem with this debate was that — after a Nevada showdown in which each of the six candidates on stage could argue that he or she had a plausible way to win the nomination — at this point it’s hard to see anyone but Sanders and Biden with a serious chance, given the results so far, the polls, and the resources they each have. Steyer aside, that’s less about a flawed debate invitation process than about no one dropping out after Nevada, but it’s a real failure of the system.
Back to the process. To start with the most obvious thing: Everyone in the U.S. and at least half of the rest of the world was talking about coronavirus on Tuesday — and the stock market cratering amid fears of serious damage to the economy — yet the moderators didn’t get around to that issue until well into the second hour of the debate. In fact, there were hardly any policy questions in the first hour at all, with the moderators instead inviting the candidates to pick fights with one another and pushing them on recent campaign controversies.
In other words, the debate on CBS wasn’t much different from recent ones on NBC and CNN. For better or worse, that’s how the journalists who run these things want it. They hope sparks will fly, and they want to be seen as asking tough questions.
But that doesn’t serve the interests of the party. (And while we only have the Democrats debating now, this applies to Republicans when they’re contesting their presidential nomination.) For a party, debates are helpful in large part because they allow policy questions to be thrashed out by the candidates. That helps achieve one of the key functions of nomination politics: arriving at policy positions and priorities through candidate competition and cooperation.
To be sure, that can happen regardless of how bad the questions are, since the candidates always have the option of talking about policy positions they think are important. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with candidates attacking one another. But while TV networks might want that for their own purposes, the party’s interests are best served when the candidates themselves are free to attack or not as they see fit.
Debates can also be helpful in the other, non-policy portions of representation; the party shows and further develops who it is by who its candidates are and how they present themselves. Again, that does tend to happen regardless of how bad the questions are, but “gotcha” demands or invitations to fight don’t really help achieve it.
Debates used to be arranged by various sponsors and the candidates, and formal party organizations had nothing to do with it. In recent cycles, the parties have taken over the process of issuing invitations. Media sponsors were happy to cede that to the parties, since the decisions were nothing but headaches for the networks. They would be a lot less happy if the parties chose their own moderators, since one of the reasons the networks host these things is to showcase their on-air talent. But it’s not at all clear, in these days of streaming and all, that the media sponsors have the clout to get what they want if the parties insist otherwise.
That said, it’s not exactly clear what party-run debates would look like if the parties did insist on them. And even if it’s in the parties’ interests as a whole to run the debates themselves, it’s possible that the risks would seem larger than the rewards, since both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee are reluctant to be seen as favoring any particular candidate (or, even worse, “rigging” things against someone).
So I suspect that nothing will really change in 2024. But after Tuesday night, I’m more convinced than ever that it should.
1. Dan Drezner on what the Trump administration’s messaging on the coronavirus is about.
2. Andrea Benjamin at the Monkey Cage on Bloomberg’s endorsements.
3. Matt Grossmann on the Democratic nomination race.
4. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla on Sanders as a general election candidate.
5. Thomas Edsall on placing Trump in history.
6. Philip Klein on Sanders’s health care math.
7. And Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman on the budget conflict over fighting coronavirus. The Trump administration wants to use it as an excuse to cut programs that Republicans always want to cut. The proper response for House Democrats? Put a clean supplemental spending bill on the House floor and dare Republicans to vote against it — and then see if Mitch McConnell is really willing to take on a fight over this.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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