The change no one is talking about in the Trump-Harris presidential debate

No one can say that presidential debates aren’t consequential since the June 27 meeting of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden effectively ended the incumbent president’s reelection bid. But something else ended that night that is worth noting and possibly worth mourning: the oversight of debates by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
The commission announced in June that it was canceling three presidential debates (including one scheduled Oct. 9 at the University of Utah) and one vice presidential debate after years of controversy in which both Republicans and Democrats have complained about its stewardship of the civic forum. A kind of populist fever seemed to have overcome the process, with both the campaigns and the TV networks wanting more control than they’ve had in recent years.
Under the commission, established in 1987, 30 of 33 debates were held on university campuses with a live audience. Beginning in 1992, the commission began a town-hall format for one of the debates, which were always 90 minutes and broadcast free of advertising. Viewers of tonight’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris may appreciate the commercial breaks — a chance to grab a snack or move a load of clothes from the washing machine to the dryer — and they may not notice the other changes that have occurred as the commission handed off the debates to the candidates and the networks. The changes are subtle, and some of the lost features of the past — like the beer tent for the press — will go unremarked.
But there’s an argument to be made that voters lost something of value in the process, something that they may not be getting back.
The Associated Press reported in May that the commission faces an “uncertain future,” and Alan Schroeder, professor emeritus at Northeastern University and a scholar of presidential debates, told me it’s hard to see how the campaigns and networks will relinquish the kind of control they had before the commission was established with the goal of making the process more neutral and organized.
“Future campaigns are going to want to negotiate directly with the sponsoring network, and I think the lack of a commission jeopardizes the the possibility of debates because of the game-playing that goes on with campaigns when they negotiate. There have been points along the way when it looked like the Harris-Trump debate wasn’t going to happen, and that’s because of posturing by the campaigns,” he said.
In the 1960s, debates had run smoothly under a consortium of the broadcast networks. From 1976 to 1984, they were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, and during those years, the candidates tried to “ride roughshod” over the league and “design the campaigns for their own benefit,” Schroeder said. The grumbling got louder in 1984 and subsequent years as campaigns objected to journalists who had been selected to serve as moderators. And the RNC threatened to pull out of commission debates during the early Trump years.
“But it was really the Biden campaign, I think, that drove the stake into the heart of the commission,” said Schroeder, the author of “Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail.”
When the Biden campaign began pushing back against the scheduled debates earlier this year, suddenly there was bipartisan dislike of the commission that was supposed to ensure neutrality, and with its June 24 announcement that it was releasing the four debate sites from its contracts, the commission pretty much faded to black. (An inquiry sent to the commission’s public relations office last week went unanswered.)
Of course, the negotiations between the campaigns and the networks were equally contentious, with both sides trying to secure rules perceived as advantageous to their candidate in Philadelphia — such as the Harris campaign lobbying for live microphones throughout the debate (perceived as helping Harris) and the Biden campaign asking for no live audience (perceived as helping Trump).
To ensure neutrality on some issues, ABC, the host of the Sept. 10 debate, relied on the arbiter of justice used on football fields everywhere: a coin flip. Per ABC, “former President Trump won the coin toss and chose to select the order of statements. The former president will offer the last closing statement, and Vice President Harris selected the right podium position on screen, i.e., stage left.”
While the cities that had been designated for the commission debates may have saved taxpayer money with the cancellations — the University of Utah had asked the state for $6.5 million to prepare for Salt Lake City’s night in the spotlight — there are nonmonetary losses that are equally significant, including the chance for students to see the political process up close. Schroeder recalled a debate he attended in 2000 at Wake University, where students had been involved as ushers, as audience members and in other roles in preparation for the meeting between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
The commission was not taxpayer funded, but received donations from corporations, including Anheuser-Busch, which, at the Wake Forest debate, had a tent outside the forum with free beer for the media, he recalled. However, “there was never a whiff of scandal in anything the commission did,” he said. “They were very good about walking the straight and narrow, and were never really accused of siding with a particular candidate or another.”
There will likely not be free beer in Philadelphia for reporters, but there will be ads for viewers, as there were on June 27, which marked the first time that presidential debates had been interrupted by ads. ABC, like CNN, stands to profit not only from advertising, but from the exposure of its personalities. Again, this is a change that will be barely perceptible to viewers — journalists have moderated the debates for decades — but outside of the commission’s control, the debates become more like media events. “It was a commercial product,” Schroeder said of the June 27 debate.
“Now the debate is not 100% a civic exercise, but a way for big corporations to make money,” he said, adding, “I think that this positioning of the debates as a commercial product is not a healthy development.”