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Candidates Bush and Kerry to meet in three debates
By Carrie Lee
Washington File Staff Writer
President Bush and Senator John Kerry will face off in the first of three presidential debates on September 30 at the University of Miami in Florida, according to the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The focus of the first debate will be foreign policy and homeland security.
The three debates -- the second is scheduled for October 8 at Washington University in Missouri and the third for October 13 at Arizona State University -- will "address those issues that are of importance to the broadest spectrum of the public," said CPD Executive Director Janet Brown.
The third debate will focus on economic and domestic policy while the second debate will be a town hall meeting where "soft" supporters (voters who slightly favor a candidate) from both parties chosen by the Gallup Organization will pose questions. One vice presidential debate is also planned for October 5 at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
CPD works to ensure that the 90-minute debates are "absolutely straightforward and without any kind of bias in terms of an issue, candidate, party or anything else," said Brown. For example, candidates may not pose direct questions to each other and are prohibited from walking around onstage or manipulating the stage to improve their own appearance. Except for the town hall meeting, a single moderator poses the questions to the candidates and monitors time limits. The candidates' statements and responses are timed, and there are audible cues and flashing lights to indicate time remaining.
Debates are the one election event geared specifically toward the general public, and in a close election year public interest is especially high, said Brown. Up to 2,500 journalists, many from international media, will cover each debate and make the debates a "focal point not only for people here but for people all over the world who are watching this election," she continued.
Presidential debates are a mainstay of the American presidential campaign process. The first televised debate between major party nominees Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960 was broadcast on television and radio. It illustrated the potential impact of debates and the importance of style and form as well as substance. Even though most of the radio audience believed Nixon had won the debate, the larger television audience thought Kennedy won, a response that likely contributed to his narrow victory.
There were no presidential debates from 1964 to 1972, largely due to the reluctance of incumbents and frontrunners to give their opponents any potential advantage. Debates resumed in the 1976 presidential election and are now a fixture of the election process.
Since its founding in 1987, the CPD has organized the presidential debates and engaged in public voter education on debates. The CPD ensures that the debates are a fair and transparent process accessible to the public through a review every election cycle, said Brown. Based on its findings of public preferences, the CPD adopted the single moderator and town-hall-meeting formats and publishes criteria for participation in the debates a year in advance.
Brown said that the potential impact of the debates is so great that many of the up to 150 presidential candidates each year want to participate. Many of these third-party or independent candidates do not meet the set criteria to participate in the debates. The criteria include the candidate being on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance to win the election (270 electoral votes), and the candidate's attaining at least 15 percent public support according to a predetermined set of opinion polls. The criteria are applied a week before each debate to determine its participants. In 2004, no third-party candidates meet the criteria for participation.
Although the impact of presidential debates is difficult to quantify, they clearly play an important role in the U.S. election process. According to Brown, debates are consistently cited in exit polls as one of the most important factors influencing voters' decisions.
There is "no question that the very large number of people who watch the debates and the fact that they learn from the debates ... makes them an extremely important piece of the general election process," said Brown.
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