Politicians’ diminishing appetite to debate leaves voters hungry for information
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Michigan’s open U.S. Senate race is expected to be one of the most contested elections in the country in November — one that could decide which party controls the chamber — yet there have been no major debates between the various candidates heading into Tuesday’s primary.
On the Democratic side, U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly) is facing off against actor Hill Harper of Detroit. The Republican primary features former U.S. Reps. Justin Amash (I-Cascade Twp.) and Mike Rogers (R-White Lake), and physician Dr. Sherri O’Donnell.
A planned debate between Slotkin and Harper was canceled at the last minute in late July, while a previous debate at the Mackinac Policy Conference that was to have featured most of the candidates from both parties was called off after Slotkin and Rogers declined to participate.
“If the candidates could win without debating, they would. If they don’t pay a price from voters, then why should they debate? It only poses risk to them,” Aaron Kall, director of the University of Michigan debate program, told the Michigan Advance.
Regardless, the fact that debates, in general, are in decline, Kall says, isn’t too surprising in the era of social media and hundreds of cable channels, when candidates are no longer reliant on debates to help spread their message to voters.
It’s also part of a trend that experts attribute at least in part to the continuing polarization of American politics amid a fractured media landscape. That means for some candidates, the benefits of participating in a debate no longer necessarily outweigh the potential liabilities.
Presidential debates
There are times when debates can end up being pivotal in races.
One need look no further than the June 27 debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to see an example that reinforces that point of view.
Almost immediately after Biden’s widely panned debate performance, calls for him to abandon his reelection bid came from officials within his own party that steamrolled until Biden eventually announced he would not seek another term and then endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee.
“If nothing else, President Biden’s really poor performance just shows the impact and risk associated with political debates,” said Kall. “That particular debate may be the most impactful one ever in that it directly resulted in him not seeking the office.”
However, Kall says one shouldn’t seek to apply too much from that specific debate to the process in general, noting Biden’s age and the fact that it took place in June, three months earlier than any presidential debate in modern history.
The agreement that set up that debate was itself a representation of a breakdown in the structure of the institution as it had existed for more than 35 years.
Starting in 1988, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), created in a bipartisan agreement between leaders of both major parties, ran general election debates every four years within a predetermined framework.
So when the Biden and Trump campaigns announced earlier this year a deal for two debates with media outlets, one in June and other in September, it was done outside the CPD framework. That generally resulted in two to three debates scheduled from mid-September to late October in venues across the country. Thus, the CPD canceled the four debates (three presidential and one vice presidential) it had planned for this fall.
Norm Ornstein with the American Enterprise Institute, who had participated with the CPD in the past, said the public would come to regret the loss of an institutionalized structure.
“By moving away from the stellar bipartisan group that has managed debates for the past nine presidential elections, we will lose the guarantee that debates will continue to be a regular, institutionalized feature of our elections,” said Ornstein. “Candidates will have an easier time avoiding debating when there is no structure in place in advance.”
And less structure could very well mean less useful data for voters, as demonstrated in post-election surveys conducted by Pew Research. In the surveys conducted from 1988 through 2016, at least six out of ten voters said the CPD debates were “very or somewhat helpful in deciding which candidate to vote for.”
Kall agrees that having fewer debates will be a loss for voters, but says it will be up to voters to demand they continue.
“The debates haven’t been around forever. It’s not like they’re an inherent right,” he said.
Sweating through your shirt
In her newly released book, “True Gretch,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer relates a story about her first campaign for the Michigan House of Representatives in 2000 in which she was knocking on doors on a “blazing hot August afternoon,” as she tried to close the gap with the Democratic frontrunner, Mary Lindemann, before that month’s primary.
Whitmer said her campaign manager pulled up and yelled for her to “Get in the car!” He had “screwed up” the date of a debate with Lindemann set to be held on WKAR-TV, not the next day as he originally thought, but that very day. In fact, she was already late.
“This was … not ideal. Being punctual is a Whitmer family trait, and I tend to arrive early for appointments — especially important ones like this,” Whitmer wrote. “Who shows up a half-hour late for a debate, in the final days of a close race? [Lindemann] seemed furious, coming at me hard throughout the debate while I tried to stay composed, at the same time trying to hide the fact that I’d sweated through my shirt.”
While Whitmer used that story to demonstrate the idea of owning one’s screw-ups (she profusely apologized to Lindemann), the story also demonstrates a time and a place where debates, even at the state legislative level, were a big deal. They mattered. Missing one was unthinkable even if you had to sweat through a shirt.
Maybe not so much now, especially for primary elections.
It forces the candidates to be off of their stump speech and just repeating the same talking points. They have to answer the questions directly. If they don't, it looks like they're evading and they may not know the answers or the people wouldn't like the answers that they're giving.
– Aaron Kall, director of the University of Michigan debate program
“The things you would say to win a primary are not going to necessarily help you in a general, so why would you put yourself out there to sound far left or far right to win some more of those votes when you really don’t need to at this point?” said Andrea Bitely, owner of the Lansing-based public relations firm, Bitely Communications, and a former GOP press secretary.
Bitely says candidates now rely on social media and their party’s other information platforms to get their message out to the base voters who typically cast ballots in a primary.
“I think that what it comes down to is they’re not going to bother, especially the frontrunner,” she said. “The only thing they could possibly do in the debate is lose points in the general. If you can’t get the front-runner to be part of the debate, what’s the point of doing the debate?”
While Michigan saw several primary debates in 2022 among Republicans running for governor and attorney general, there were none for secretary of state, a state of affairs largely attributed to the eventual nominee, Kristina Karamo, winning an early endorsement from Trump. That gave her little incentive to debate the two other Republicans seeking the spot, former state Rep. Beau Lafave (R-Iron Mountain) and Chesterfield Township Clerk Cindy Berry.
Following Karamo’s selection as the GOP candidate at the state Republican convention in April 2022, LaFave lamented what he foresaw as a general election liability in putting forth a candidate known for her belief in the QAnon conspiracy, ties to extremist groups and a belief that Satan was involved in everything from yoga to churches that hang rainbow flags.
“Every ad from April 24 through November is going to say ‘QAnon Karamo is too crazy for us,'” he said.
While there were two gubernatorial debates featuring Whitmer and her GOP challenger Tudor Dixon, there were no debates for secretary of state heading into the general election, in which incumbent Democrat Jocelyn Benson easily defeated Karamo.
Benson and Karamo had agreed to a joint appearance on WKAR-TV’s “Off the Record.” But Karamo essentially scuttled it by claiming, without evidence, that PBS was known for “favoring Democrats,” and demanding a Republican-leaning co-moderator be added along with veteran host Tim Skubick, someone known for being unafraid to direct tough questions at candidates from either party.
Similarly, there was no general election debate for the attorney general race, although that was due to the never-before-seen situation in which the office of the incumbent attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, was actively investigating her rival, Republican Matthew DePerno, for allegedly illegally tampering with voting tabulators. Nessel said under those circumstances, a debate was not feasible.
An independent prosecutor later brought charges against DePerno and others in the case.
The best kind of job interview
“I don’t know that there’s less appetite either from the public or from the candidates, but it has gotten harder,” said Paula Bowman, the co-president of the Michigan League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that has been organizing and conducting candidate debates for decades.
Bowman tells the Advance that at least part of the reason getting debates that are fully participated in has become more difficult is the increasing partisanship that has seeped down to the local level.
“In some communities, there is a reluctance to participate in League debates because some of the candidates may think they’re going to be treated unfairly, and it’s just not the case,” she said. “If anybody has been to a League forum, they know we have an exhaustive set of rules that we play by and that the candidates receive in advance. And we just are so careful to be nonpartisan and fair.”
Bowman says some candidates may decline to participate because of the League’s reputation as a progressive organization that champions voting rights, which she says is advocated for without favor of party affiliation, but has unfortunately become a political issue in and of itself.
Regardless, she says the decline in debate participation is a loss for all voters.
“They are missing out on unedited spontaneous responses to questions that we ask,” said Bowman. “The League never gives candidates the questions in advance. That said, there are never any ‘gotcha’ questions. They are all questions that a candidate running for an office should be perfectly capable of responding to. But seeing body language, seeing facial expressions, will give voters, I think, an opportunity to see this person live or even on a tape and just to get to know them a little better in the way they respond to a question, the way they maybe smirk at their opponents or at the League moderator. But all of those live details can really help people make a decision, I think.”
Kall agrees that nothing really tests the mettle of a candidate like interacting in a live debate, having to use their political skills and knowledge in real time.
“It’s probably the best kind of job interview that you can have,” he said.
Kall said that as political polarization increases and people mostly stay within their “comfortable media ecosystems,” debates are one of the few opportunities where candidates have to answer some really difficult questions.
“And then the audience gets to see them kind of work through those questions, process them in real time, which would be a really important thing if they were in office and there was a crisis and they had to work through that emerging issue in real time even if they weren’t prepared for it. We always talk about the 3 a.m. phone call, something unexpected that could happen,” Kall said. “Things like that occur on the debate stage, and the voters get to see how the candidates handle it.”
Bowman says other factors that have made debates harder to stage are the lack of venues willing to offer up space, including city or township halls that decide to bow out if candidates from one party decide not to participate and they are concerned about appearing to favor the party whose candidate does agree to take part.
“Sometimes we have to pay a venue to hold it, and the League is a nonprofit, which depends on our dues and our donations, and all of that eats away at our ability to circulate this information,” said Bowman.
Neither carrot nor stick
The 2022 campaign season was marked not just by less debates, but also by much less interaction with local and national journalists, especially by Republican candidates.
Bowman says those two factors may not be coincidental, because as local news sources have dwindled, so too did the League’s ability to inform the public that a forum was taking place.
“I remember the Observer Newspapers had a reporter there for every single one of the forums in northwest Wayne County and would report on them so that people knew that not only this was going on, because they’d give advance notice of the event, but they’d also report on the actual forum and give a review of it.”
That reporting would certainly include which officials participated and which did not, but also whether a candidate made an unsubstantiated statement or openly demeaned their opponent, creating both a “carrot” incentive to take part, and a “stick” disincentive to be untruthful or disruptive.
But with a 2023 report by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University finding more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, that incentive system has broken down in many instances.
That being the case, Kall said voters can expect more pre-vetted campaign talking points and much less ability to create an impression about a candidate based on how they answer questions and relate to people in real time during a debate.
“It forces the candidates to be off of their stump speech and just repeating the same talking points,” he said. “They have to answer the questions directly. If they don’t, it looks like they’re evading and they may not know the answers or the people wouldn’t like the answers that they’re giving. So, yes, debates in general are great for that kind of vetting of candidates, but when we don’t have them, you may not see the impact of that decision until down the road where you realize, ‘Oh, this person’s not really ready for prime time.’”
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