The fifth GOP primary debate was held Wednesday in Des Moines. With any luck, it will be the last primary debate of 2024 — and if American voters are really lucky, it will be the last presidential debate of the year, including the general election. The Wednesday sleep fest clearly showed the vacuous nature of such media events.
Televised political debates are not really debates in the traditional sense; they are made-for-TV spectacles designed to promote television channels and their anchors. Television is a medium of emotion, not for rational discussion. Optics and sound bites are more important than careful, logical reasoning. The format of a television “debate” forces candidates to cram their analyses of complicated issues into 90-second chunks. Lincoln-Douglas this is not.
Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley fell into the normal traps of these televised monstrosities last night, relying on consultant-driven one-liners and cheap attacks on each other. They both came off as unrelatable, whiny and combative — just the kind of thing that turns off voters in this era. Sure, they were fully prepared and had lots of factoids to toss around, but this rhetoric of political machinery was not at all conversational. DeSantis and Haley both talked way too fast, apparently not aware that talking deliberately is key in public rhetoric, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated while becoming the “great communicator.”
While trying to deliver knockout punches to each other, the candidates seemed oblivious to the fact that their two larger opponents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, are the bigger obstacles to their political futures. DeSantis and Haley directed their most caustic comments at each other, instead of Trump or Biden.
The two-hour format is way too long when just two candidates are on the stage. That led to redundancy by both candidates as they struggled to keep their remarks fresh. Haley filled much of her time reminding people to go to the website she promoted as pointing out DeSantis’s lies. Her rhetorical strategy sounded curious near the end of the debate, however, when she said, “Leaders bring out the best in people,” after spending two hours calling her opponent a liar.
For their part, CNN’s debate moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, were predictable as representatives of the left-leaning news channel.
Both wanted to engage the show as pseudo-debaters, asking questions that targeted the candidates in press conference style, rather than providing questions that gave each candidate an equal challenge. Bash suggested DeSantis was not committed to conservative visions of limited government. Tapper pointed out to Haley that her education record as governor of South Carolina was poor. Such questions are fine in sit-down interviews, but not in formal political debates. The candidates themselves are right there to provide challenges to each other, should they decide on their own.
The utility of televised debates has been questioned for years, but 2024 has brought a whole new level of superficiality to the process. Such debates seldom move the political needle one way or the other. After five Republican primary debates, things ended up pretty much as they were expected to sort out. Trump is still leading in the polls and paid no price for boycotting the nonsense. Audiences for these debates have exited in droves because they know how shallow this kind of political stunting is.
Democrats held 11 televised primary debates in the runup to the 2020 election. By far, the worst presenter and debater was none other than Joe Biden, who, in spite of his flimsy debate performances, still won his party’s nomination and the general election.
Two more GOP debates are scheduled for this year. If the GOP hierarchy is smart, it will announce right now that the events are cancelled. There is nothing else Haley and DeSantis could possibly say at this point. Chris Christie is now out of the race and it will take a lightning strike for Vivek Ramaswamy to be allowed on the next stage. And Trump surely won’t show up at this point, given that his boycott strategy has worked great.
As for the general election, the Commission on Presidential Debates has a three-debate lineup scheduled for this fall. It is hard to figure that debating would be productive for either Biden or Trump, if they do become the nominees. Biden’s handlers surely know he is not up to the task. An appearance on a debate stage risks a major gaffe, a fall, or just a lack of speaking coherence that would put on full display what the public generally thinks anyway. There is a reason Biden doesn’t do press conferences. As for Trump, general election debates would again demonstrate his irascible nature, a key factor that helped him lose in 2020.
Presidential campaign debates need to be canned for 2024. Maybe they could return in 2028 with different candidates and a new visionary television production process. But for now, there is no need to aggravate and insult the citizenry with this kind of nonsensical circus.
Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on X @Prof_McCall.