On September 10, millions of Americans will tune in to watch the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The operative word is clock. The most important factor is not the dialogue, but how each candidate looks, reacts and delivers their lines.
If anyone doubts the impact of the visual, they need only be reminded of US President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance a month ago when the first—and only—presidential debate between him and Trump effectively brought the Democratic ticket together. an end. As Americans watched the aging Biden struggle to walk across the stage and finish coherent sentences, the verbal salad and split screen reactions were the beginning of the historic end.
The visual nature of modern presidential debates has been true since the beginning, with John F. Nixon vs. Richard Nixon in 1960. Kennedy’s performance was the first televised presidential debate. The reality of the debate format, however, became truly apparent several years later, on September 23, 1976, when the audio equipment broke down during a back-and-forth between former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and current President Gerald Ford. The candidates stood on stage, debating for 21 minutes, pausing to watch the audience. That moment in discussion history confirmed that the camera is indeed king.
Most people forget that, even though Kennedy and Nixon broke up in 1960, televised debates didn’t resume until 14 years later. In the intervening years many candidates did not want to participate and could blame the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) equal time provision, which required networks to include every single nominee on stage. (The FCC temporarily suspended the provision in 1960, allowing only Kennedy and Nixon to appear at the event.) Incumbent President Lyndon Johnson saw no reason to pay more attention in the fall of 1964, given Sen. Barry Goldwater’s significant lead in the polls. ; And in 1968 and 1972, Nixon had no interest in repeating his experience from 1960.
In 1976 things changed. A year earlier, the FCC announced that it was suspending the provision of equal time for the debates unless they were sponsored by the candidates and the networks broadcast them in their entirety, thus distinguishing them from regular news stories. Non-Partisan League of Women Voters Agreed To sponsor discussions.
Ford believed that he could benefit from debating. Struggling in the polls after a tough primary battle against then-Governor Ronald Reagan of California, he was not as well known as his predecessor and was never elected to national office. (Nixon appointed Ford, then the House minority leader, as vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, and then Ford took over the presidency when Nixon left office in 1974.) Carter’s team was eager to negotiate because it believed its candidate was charismatic and Telegenic, able to recreate the magic of JFK. Carter himself was nervous, as was he Recalled later: “Feeling insecure about being put, at least for that hour and a half, on an equal footing with the nation’s president.”
After the Vietnam War and Watergate, Americans were disillusioned, distrustful, and angry. About 70 million people tuned in to the September debate to see what the two candidates had to say. Average attendance for the World Series from 1973 to 1979 was about 36 million people; The first episode of original 29 million drawn in January 1977. Making the dialogue even more interesting was the fact that most Americans still didn’t really know what Carter, a true outsider to Washington politics, was. He surprised all the pundits in the primaries by defeating some of the biggest stalwarts in Washington and then doing very well against Ford as the fall began.
The September debate was held at Philadelphia’s historic Walnut Street Theater, just blocks from Independence Hall. An audience of about 500 people, along with 200 journalists, sat in the balcony after they could not clap or even laugh. The orchestra section in front of the candidates was empty, except for Secret Service agents who were close by to protect them.
Eighty-one minutes in, the debate was not as exciting as the networks had hoped. The candidates went back and forth on local policy. Carter’s advisers, hoping he would look like Kennedy, found him nervous and wooden.
Then the breakdown happened. A technical problem with the audio equipment—a faulty amplifier—made it impossible for the audience to hear what Carter and Ford were saying. The moderator, Edwin Newman, interrupted Carter, who was warning Americans that there had been a “breakdown of faith among our people,” saying, “I’m sorry, Governor, I have to tell you that we have no voice. Out on the air.”
The cameras kept rolling. Willing to avoid doing anything that might be a visual embarrassment to the campaign, the candidates stood silent and still, sometimes shifting from foot to foot. He occasionally took sips of his water, and his gaze alternated between looking down and straight ahead. No one knew when the voice would return.
The situation was as unsettling as can be imagined. This New York Times informed At the time: “They both knew that eight cameras were still feeding one picture to four networks. They made no sign of irritation. There were no frown lines either. They just stood there, quietly, patiently… waiting for American technology to work itself out.
Two candidates were like “robots,” Carter remember In 1989. “We always expected that the next moment it would be over, and then we were going to be back on live television, and when the cameras were able to go on the air again, we were going to see how. “
ford, to speak About the incident that same year, said, “I suspect we both would have liked to sit back and relax while the technicians were fixing the system, but I think we were both reluctant to make any gestures that we might have been. Not physically or mentally capable of facing such a problem.”
27 minutes later, at 11:15 a.m., the crew finally started the machinery. Although the next day’s coverage didn’t pay much attention to the awkward break, the moment was more important than it seemed at the time. From the indefinite pause in the action, one thing has remained clear, something that the candidates and their campaigns will never forget: When it comes to televised debates, the camera is king. While there are limits to how bad or good moments can fundamentally reshape the dynamics of a race — game-changers like the Biden-Trump debate are rare — the impact they have often comes on the scene.
There have been many televised debate moments since 1976 that have had an impact. In 1980, Carter gave a long-winded statement trying to explain how his opponent would cut Medicare, calling it “There You Go Again,” as Reagan smiled and laughed. It cuts to the bone. In 1988, the coolness with which Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis displayed why he would not support the death penalty against a fictional man who had raped and murdered his wife evoked voters’ worst perceptions of a callous politician. In 1992, current President George HW Bush repeated the perception that he was distant, out of touch, and uninterested during a town-hall debate. In the first presidential debate of 2000, Texas Governor George W. Vice President Al Gore sighed so much while Bush was speaking that his voices became fodder for a legendary SNL sketch that called him arrogant and robotic. When Gore approached Bush during the third debate, the governor turned the tables on his opponent, gave a bemused smile and walked back his answer, leaving the vice president looking a bit odd. In 2012, Barack Obama’s advisers went into a complete tailspin when the frustrated president appeared annoyed and fired by the fact that he had to appear on stage with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. And in 2016, when Trump physically walked around then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in one of his debates, he conveyed a creepy and scary image that captured exactly what his opponents hated and supporters loved.
Trump knows television; He likes cameras. He has always been obsessed with the medium, and rose to prominence on the national stage through appearances on Fox and his hit reality show, the apprentice. There are plenty of reports that he’s micro-focused on the details of discussions, wanting to know how they’ll be positioned and camera angles, and treating everyone like a full-blown show. Even when he was dodging an assassin’s bullet, he had an uncanny ability to think about what people were seeing on screen—and could see when the event was shared as a clip. This year’s Republican National Convention was a full-blown televised extravaganza, complete with dramatic lighting, celebrity showboats (like Hulk Hogan) and dramatically choreographed scenes of Trump, wearing earplugs, entering and exiting the arena.
Trump must know things are not going well for him. Harris is looking good. Her enthusiasm and expressions of joy turned from a potential problem to a source of strength. Trump only has to look at old clips of her in Senate hearings, like when she asked then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, “What laws give the government the power to make decisions about a male institution?” And when he declined to answer, or when she asked Biden in 2019 about his record on school busing and his history of working with separatists, to see Harris’ ability to focus and skew his opponents on message, she refused to give up. During the 2020 vice presidential debate, Harris cut Vice President Mike Pence down to size when he interrupted. “Mr. Vice President, I speak,” Harris said.
In recent weeks, Trump has been desperate to regain media attention. His interview with Elon Musk on X was a disaster, from the long delays resulting from technical issues, to the artful quality of the entire interview, to the odd lisp in his voice.
For all her moments of success, however, Harris has also shown weaknesses in the television arena, including her 2021 run-in with Lester Holt for vice president and her problematic performance in other parts of the 2019 primary debates. The vice president will have to navigate through Trump’s attempts to throw her off her game — in front of the cameras that immobilized Carter and Ford on the air decades ago.
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