As the first presidential primaries grow closer and the field of Democratic candidates slowly dwindles, some voters are beginning to narrow down their preferences. While there is a plethora of information available to learn more about candidates and their policies, one of the most accessible ways to directly compare candidates’ visions is through the debates. Widely publicized and viewed, they are a critical resource for Americans seeking to be politically informed.
Unfortunately, though, the structure of the 2020 debates — from the overly-crowded stages to the excessive lengths — makes them inaccessible, prevents important issues from being discussed, and makes it difficult for voters to use them as an effective means of comparing the views and policies of the candidates. This ultimately hurts both the candidates and the accessibility and efficiency of our democratic process. Future debates should consider alternate structures, such as splitting the debates into multiple nights over a longer period of time or changing the way they are moderated, to maximize their usefulness.
A Grueling Affair
By all accounts, three-hour debates are exhausting to watch. During the September primary debates, by hour two even New York Times analysts were bemoaning the fact that an hour remained. If even they, who are more politically aware than the average American and who ostensibly chose this profession, struggle to remain engaged in a debate for three hours, it is highly likely most Americans watching at home or in between various other tasks will as well.
Despite the length of the debates, however, the size of the field renders it practically impossible to cover all the issues Americans want to hear about or obtain a full understanding of any candidate’s views. According to the New York Times analysis of last week’s debate, each candidate spoke about any one topic for approximately one to two minutes, and some hot-button issues, such as climate change and immigration policy, were barely discussed at all. In the midst of youth climate protests spanning the nation and an election in which 72 percent of Democrats report that climate change is a “very important” issue to them, the September debate only had time to allow four of the 10 candidates to broach the topic, and the October debate did not allot any time to it at all.
Since many of the Democratic candidates have largely similar views —for example, they all pledge to push for climate change action and decisively denounce the president’s immigration policies — the lack of time to respond to each question precludes voters from comparing the intricacies of their policies. Debates have not allowed “the candidates to delve into the differences of opinions that they may have,” Faiz Shakir, Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager, explained to The Atlantic.
Possibilities for Change
Though most agree that something needs to change, opinions vary on what that is. One option is to split debates into two nights more often; the fourth debate, then, instead of having a chaotic twelve candidates on stage at a time could have been two shorter nights with six candidates each.
This would also hopefully allow longer speaking allotments for each candidate. “A debate with 10 people is not very useful unless you can allocate them sufficient amount of time,” Ed Lee, the senior director of Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation, and Dialogue at Emory University told The Wrap. Currently, candidates have at most 75 seconds to answer questions, forcing them to rely on one-liners that may garner applause but do little in terms of increasing voter literacy. Allowing longer response times would force candidates to go deeper than surface-level and actually explain the complexities of their policies. Shunta Jordan, the chair of the executive board for the National Debate Coaches Association and the head debate coach at the University of Georgia, agrees, arguing that candidates should have at least 90 seconds to respond to questions. And both Lee and Paul Hayes, the director of debate at George Washington University, believe candidates should have at least five to six minutes of response time for each question.
Another possible solution is to revise the way the debates are moderated. Having focused debates that are geared toward a few specific topics may allow candidates to delve deeper into the issues that are most important to voters and will prevent some candidates’ views on important issues from being overlooked. Moderators could also try to pose questions aimed at prompting candidates to reason through their policies rather than those meant to start fights that often lead to insults instead of constructive debate.
Yet another option is to raise the bar for qualifying, but this early in the race — there are still months until the first primaries — it may be unwise to forcibly quiet the voices of lower-polling candidates. Preventing lesser-known candidates from having a platform with the large audience of a debate seems premature and unfair both to these candidates and to the voters who may have hardly heard of them because of the easy name-recognition and dominance of the most popular candidates.
Looking Ahead
Though eight candidates have already qualified for the November debates and there will likely be more to follow, it is far from too late for the DNC to change its policies, as there will be at least seven more debates before the end of April 2020. Hopefully the DNC will soon recognize that more changes need to be made to the structure of the debates to allow American voters to have better, more efficient access to information about their potential future presidents.
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