The year is 1960. In a blur of Cold War anxieties and lunch counter sit-ins, viewers await the presidential debate with bated breath. The assertion that this was the first televised presidential debate is technically false — that distinction belongs to former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Sen. Margaret Chase Smith in 1956. Nevertheless, it is true that Americans in 1960 saw, for the first time in the nation’s history, two presidential candidates arguing important issues on live television.
Presidential debates have been baked into the modern-day understanding of politics. Seeing politicians clearly explain their platforms and watching as they respond to hard-hitting questions and criticisms on the fly seems beneficial. Many argue that debates help maintain a healthy democracy; with potential future leaders forced to answer for their positions live on air, they provide the American people with a certain level of transparency and a general understanding of their options. They also encourage civic engagement, with the debate between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris receiving over 67 million viewers.
But this is an idealistic view of debates. Studies have shown that debates don’t have a significant impact on voters’ choices, with the majority already going into the final presidential debate knowing which candidate they are voting for. There are a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, including that most people watching a debate are more politically engaged than the average person and thus already have a strong candidate preference. There are obvious moments in debates that receive a flurry of media attention, especially in the age of social media, but even then, the focus dies out quickly.
An obvious example is the recent presidential debate between Harris and Trump, with many of Trump’s comments — which were fact-checked during the debate — going viral on social media. People made song edits and posted dances mocking his statement that people in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs, with some videos receiving close to 1.5 million likes. But the buzz faded, media attention turned to the vice presidential debate and Trump was elected as our next president. The fact that many experts claimed Harris won the debate did not matter.
That presidential debates don’t impact outcomes is disproven by historically embarrassing debate losses. The aforementioned Nixon vs. Kennedy debate is now infamous for the idea that Kennedy won the televised debate because he looked significantly better than Nixon. Nixon was suffering from the symptoms of staphylococcal infection and had crashed his knee in the car door before entering the debate, so he was in far worse physical condition than Kennedy, who looked healthy and confident. But even the idea that this debate lost Nixon the election has been disproven in recent studies, showing that the myth of the game-changer debate is just that — a myth.
Regardless, Kennedy went on to win that presidential election, and presidential campaigns became a different beast, with celebrity endorsements, commercials and even appearances on comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live” becoming the norm. As the decades since the Nixon vs. Kennedy debates have come and gone, many scholars argue that the introduction of the televised debate has changed political campaigns forever, leading to appearance and pop culture relevancy mattering more than the content of one’s platform.
Presidential debates are unlikely to ever be eliminated from the modern-day presidential campaign route, especially with the Democracy in Presidential Debates Act of 1993, which states that candidates can only receive campaign funding if they agree to participate in debates. At this point, all we can ask is that debate viewers still try to care about what the candidates are saying. Vice President-elect JD Vance refusing to answer whether Trump lost the 2020 election should take precedence over Tim Walz misspeaking that he has become friends with school shooters. Nixon and Kennedy’s actual statements were more important than Nixon’s disheveled appearance. Even though politics has turned into another form of entertainment, it still informs our rights and our lives, and we cannot look past that.
