Presidential Debates Are A Waste Of Time: Here's How We Could Fix Them ...

This week both political parties agreed to hold multiple Presidential debates between President Biden and former President Trump. Many observers are already criticizing it as a waste of time and unlikely to change anyone's mind. They are probably right, but what if they weren't?

The idea of giving the public a chance to hear directly from candidates in an unfiltered way is an important one.

Unfortunately, it's an ideal that the modern debate format rarely lives up to. Instead, these televised debates are filled with one platitude after another in a quest to make and say that things that satisfy a politician's base without turning off too many undecided voters (if they even exist anymore) or making too big a gaffe (which I once heard entertainingly described as a moment when a politician accidentally tells the truth).

The problem with debates is that the "winner" is often declared based on things that really don't matter. So we end up focusing on trivia like who had the better body language or the better soundbite "zinger" to attack the other person.

A real debate is an exchange of ideas and an argument by someone who has a position and is willing to take a stand behind it. That never happens in most political debates.

So what would it take to make debates actually useful again? Imagine if we skipped the naive idea that pitting two presidential candidates against one another on stage was going to be a debate at all and instead turned this into a real time interview.

Journalists from multiple media organizations would be invited to develop a list of questions. Ordinary citizens would as well. Then through a process of voting and perhaps a randomized lottery, 30 questions would be selected to be asked to both candidates individually. Every question would have a hard stop of 2 minutes per answer and candidates would be in SEPARATE rooms, recording LIVE to camera or broadcast live simultaneously.

Like a game show, candidates would be locked down with no outside advice or influence and have no idea how their opponent answered the same question. They would have no opportunity to converse with their opponent. The entire thing would last for 2 hours (up to 60 minutes for each candidate) and then the answers would be broadcast widely by ALL media outlets.

As they are being broadcast (or shortly afterwards), a bipartisan team of fact checking journalists would grade each answer and provide a side by side commentary on what elements of an answer are factual and which are not.

Here's why this could work:

1. Reduces the role of outrage theater. Most debates and the coverage afterwards is centered on "gotcha" moments where candidates said or did something that was so outrageous it was memorable. By focusing attention on this, we provide candidates with an incentive to avoid saying anything of substance and lowering their remarks to the most aggressive or funny.
2. Forces candidates to focus on themselves. Rather than spending an entire debate talking about all the reasons their opponent is a terrible choice, this format could lead to more focus on a candidate's actual beliefs. Answering every question by talking about an opponent would quickly become tiresome in this format - which might create more necessity for candidates to talk about what they would actually do if elected president.
3. Makes the debate process more democratic. Right now, having a single moderator come up with questions (no matter how skillful) is always going to introduce an element of individual bias. If the questions were selected by a panel of journalists along with some ability for the American public to also submit questions, they could be more reflective of what people actually care about.
4. Removes the unnecessary distraction of a live audience. Without the need to cater to a live audience (even if that audience is consistently told by a moderator to keep their reactions quiet), we might find candidates more directly share their positions and audience members can form their own conclusions. To their credit, the current proposed model for the debates does include a provision for no live audience so hopefully this will remain.
5. Showcases real time fact checking. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the modern format is that politicians can lie directly in a debate with very few repercussions. It is near impossible for even a talented moderator to do this in real time. This debate interview format could REQUIRE the integration of real time fact checking through a combination of human fact checkers and AI fact checking algorithms that show up side by side with attendees responses so people can see what is truthful and what isn't.

What do you think? Do we miss anything by not having opponents getting into a verbal circus where they attack one another? Could this format provide a more valuable way to actually get to know the real character and beliefs of presidential candidates? And should we use a similar format to evaluate candidates for other elected offices too?

Let me know what you think in the comments!