The first presidential debate of the 2024 U.S. election will be held on Friday, June 28 at 9 a.m. The 81-year-old incumbent President Joe Biden and the 78-year-old former President Donald Trump will not only repeat the verbal battle for the White House four years ago, but this one-on-one public debate will officially ring the deepest, most controversial and most confusing presidential campaign in American political history.
But why is it that the voting date for this US election is November 5, but this presidential debate broke with convention and was held earlier than four months before the election? In the politics of the U.S. campaign, how did the live debate of the presidential candidates evolve into a traditional program? Trump, who often speaks out of control and goes violently, and Biden, who repeatedly forgets words, what political calculations do they have for early debates? In addition to the "live broadcast" that may reproduce the debate 4 years ago, what are the must-see points of the debate between Trump and Biden?
90 minutes of one-on-one debate with microphone auto-mute to block tactical interjections
According to the election data of the United States Democratic Coordination website "RealClearPolitics", as of the eve of the debate, Trump only slightly led Biden with 1% support, and the gap between the two sides was within the margin of error; The American data news website "538" integrates the analysis of polls in various states, and the winning rates of Biden and Trump in the respective elections have been in a state of stalemate.
According to the joint statement of Biden and the Trump campaign, the first candidate televised debate for the 2024 U.S. presidential election will be hosted and broadcast by CNN - this is the first presidential debate hosted by the news media alone since the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon in 1960 - and the two sides agreed to be held at CNN's Atlanta headquarters on the evening of June 27. A 90-minute one-on-one debate will be held.
CNN announced that in order to ensure the fairness, impartiality and fluency of the debate, the broadcast will no longer be open to viewers. During the debate, there will only be paper, pens, and mineral water on the podium, and candidates are not allowed to bring their own props, even during intermission, and they are not allowed to have any contact with the staff team.
What's more, the microphones on the podium will be automatically muted except for the candidates' exclusive speaking time, so the candidates in the 2016 and 2020 presidential debates, as well as Trump's signature "tactical interjections" used to disrupt the opponent's rhythm and response, will be technically blocked in this debate.
In the American electoral tradition, the presidential candidates' televised debates have always been the climax of global attention and detonating the mood of the American election. Because in the global live broadcast, each candidate's debate style, expression, humorous sentence or wrong speech can become an embarrassing end to the momentum of the election campaign and even the last memory of his political career.
Traditionally, televised debates for U.S. presidential elections are held 50 days before the election, partly because the campaign atmosphere is in its final swing, and partly because the candidates' political blueprints have been finalized since then. However, the first debate of the 2024 presidential election was held 130 days before the election – not only is it the most "advanced" presidential televised debate in American political history, but the reason behind it highlights the dramatic shift in voting behavior of American voters.
The first presidential debate that changed American politics, Nixon's eternal regret that "a picture is worth a thousand words".
The first televised debate for presidential candidates in U.S. history was the live showdown between Nixon and Kennedy on September 26, 1960, when the 47-year-old Nixon was vice president of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower; And the 43-year-old Kennedy, although he is close in age to Nickerson and entered politics at the same time, has become a rising superstar of the Democratic Party because of his handsome appearance and personable young image.
Prior to the televised debate of 1960, there had been no public debate between candidates in the U.S. presidential election. This is because the United States is a vast country and has different political ecology and concerns from state to state, and candidates have traditionally preferred to travel and hold separate political presentations. But by the late 1950s, television had become ubiquitous in American homes, and it was only then that it began to be used in campaign propaganda and changed the traditional political ecology of the United States.
By the 1960 election, when the candidates had begun to run campaign advertisements on television and even hold primaries to present their political opinions, Nickerson and Kennedy agreed to attend when the three major television networks in the United States invited the experimental "live broadcast of the presidential debates", because the two had been stuck in the polls all the way, and there was no room for each to give up the emerging arena of television.
On the eve of the televised debate, Mr. Nixon was confident because of his political experience, having made a name for himself in the "Kitchen Debate" in Moscow a year earlier with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. A few weeks before he shared the stage with Kennedy, Richard Richard was injured during a North Carolina campaign — he accidentally broke his knee while driving the car door and was hospitalized with a serious infection caused by poor wound care. Although Nickson was barely discharged from the hospital before the day of the debate, he contracted the flu again and had a fever until he took the stage.
Nickson, who was not in good shape, was not only unwell, but also very irritable. Not only did he refuse the makeup advice of the TV station, but he also deliberately or unintentionally unkempt in his personal dress, and even appeared on stage with a beard, but the most fatal mistake was that Nickerson, who had just recovered from a serious illness, chose a gray suit that did not fit well that day, which not only made Nickson's face more pale and withered in the black-and-white TV broadcast at the time, but also blended in with the background of the debate, making Nickson's visual image more weak, gloomy and even unreliable, and even Nickson's 75-year-old mother made an urgent call after watching the broadcast, Anxiously asked his son "if he was seriously ill".
In contrast, the energetic Kennedy not only kept himself clean and tidy, but also deliberately changed into a black fitted suit to set off Kennedy's bronzed and healthy complexion - more importantly, Kennedy was very aware of the peculiarity of the television effect, and he watched the camera throughout the whole process whether he spoke or not, showing the political persuasiveness that made the voters watching the broadcast feel that "the candidate is talking to me"; However, Nickson, who was unprepared for the broadcast process, turned his eyes to the host and the reporter team who spoke, although this habit of looking directly at each other was a debate tradition, but in the broadcast that year, what the audience in front of the TV saw was Nickson's point deduction performance of looking left and right and squinting at people.
Although Nixon, who recovered his health, performed better than Kennedy in the next three debates, voters' impression was still stuck in the first TV debate, and in the end, Nixon, who could not effectively reverse the momentum, allowed Kennedy to win the White House with 100,000 votes.
Kennedy's victory in 1960 was seen as a turning point in the era of "televised election campaigns" in the United States. Although historians still debate how much material damage that epoch-making televised debate did to Nickerson's election, Nickerson himself was deeply remorseful about the failure of the debate, and in his 1962 memoirs, Nickerson wrote even more bitterly:
「当时的我，怎会忘了那句千古箴言──『一图胜千言』（a picture is worth a thousand words）？」
Although the televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon in the 1960 election attracted 60 million voters and ushered in the "television age" of American politics, it taught future generations of presidential candidates a valuable lesson: don't make a mistake and never participate in a televised debate unless you have to.
After the 1960 election, both Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, and Nixon, who led the comeback of the Republican Party, refused to participate in the presidential televised debate, and the presidential debate was interrupted for 16 years, until the 1976 presidential election, when then-President Gerald Ford took the initiative to send a message to the Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, which reopened the long-awaited presidential debate.
The televised presidential debate, which was relaunched in 1976, was organized by the League of Women Voters, a nongovernmental organization. The format of the debate is similar to that of 1960, with a "senior journalist question group" organised by the organisers to question candidates on various directions of national policy.
Ford was originally Nickerson's vice president, but after the Watergate scandal, Nickelsen was forced to resign in August 1974, and Ford, who took over, entered the White House. However, during the two-year term of President Ford, not only was domestic inflation serious, but Ford was strongly criticized for his amnesty of Nixon, so in the 1976 election, Ford, who was backward, was eager to reverse the decline in the election through a one-on-one live broadcast.
But the showdown between Ford and Carter was full of twists and turns. At the end of the first televised debate, the live broadcast radio equipment suddenly failed, and the two waited silently on the podium, leaving the country's 60 million voters watching the embarrassing pantomime in front of their television sets. In the second debate, Ford made a mistake at an important moment, although he meant to emphasize that the United States would never accept the Soviet Union's Iron Curtain control over Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European countries, but he uttered a very outrageous gaffe: "The Soviet Union did not rule Eastern Europe... I do not believe that the Poles think they are ruled by the Iron Curtain."
Ford's gaffe shattered the Republican Party's already rising morale and allowed Carter, who was inexperienced in diplomacy and poor in debate, to win the 1976 election. But when President Carter faced Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he faced the same predicament as Ford. Carter, who was seeking re-election, tried to avoid participating in the debate, but was challenged by Reagan's latecomer in the polls. But Reagan, a Hollywood movie star, is not only eloquent and steady, but also repeatedly shows his famous American humor style, completely overpowering Carter's debate performance with jokes or golden sentences - among them, Reagan's key questions in the debate not only crushed Carter's election momentum in one fell swoop, but also became a classic slogan in American electoral politics:
「过去4年，你的生活变得更好了吗？（Are You Better Off Than You Were 4 Years Ago?）」
Ford's gaffe and Reagan's golden sentence set the gold standard for televised debates in the U.S. presidential election. Since then, the live debate of the presidential candidates has become a regular program for the election campaign - the presidential debate is like the countdown to the New Year's Eve, symbolizing that the White House election campaign has entered the most white-hot climax stage; And every debate attracts tens of millions of American households to watch it live, making the quadrennial U.S. presidential election debate the second most watched fixture in the U.S. after the Super Bowl.
As political importance and voter attention grew, the League of Women Voters, who hosted the debate, faced tremendous pressure from all walks of life in politics. Sideline issues such as voter audiences looking forward to direct confrontations between candidates, ongoing debates over the qualifications of representatives to the press corps, and the eligibility of independent candidates outside of the two major parties in the United States to participate in presidential debates have all made the preparation of the debate highly politicized.
Finally, on the eve of the 1988 presidential election, the Republicans and Democrats decided to coordinate the debate agenda and procedures on their own, which forced the League of Women Voters to quit the team organizing the presidential debate in anger, accusing the two parties of trying to "hijack the way the presidential debate is held" and deprive voters of their civil right to truly understand the candidates and national policies Debates) took over.
Polarized politics and an increase in absentee voting forced the presidential debate four months earlier
Since the 1988 U.S. election, the Presidential Debate Committee has dominated every presidential debate, and its basic structure is four debates: three presidential candidates and one vice presidential debate; One of the three presidential debates took the form of a "town hall meeting," in which representatives of the electorate asked questions directly to the candidates.
However, in the 2024 presidential debate, Trump and Biden not only skipped the presidential debate committee and directly engaged with the media, but also shortened the presidential debate from three to two, and started the first debate 130 days before the election, when the candidates of both parties have not yet completed their party nominations. Both the Trump and Biden teams emphasized that although the Presidential Debate Committee has dominated the election debate since 1988, the two elections in 2016 and 2020 have highlighted that the "traditional model" can no longer respond to the actual needs of American voters.
Taking the most critical "timing" as an example, most of the traditional time of presidential debates in the United States is held one month before the polling day, in order to summarize the candidates' political views and encourage citizens to exercise their right to vote. But for more than a decade, American voters have used absentee voting
Including early voting, correspondence voting, etc., the rules vary from state to state in the United States, but generally refer to in-person voting that is not on Election Day.
The percentage is growing, and many states have already started voting by correspondence 60 days before the election, and the presidential debate, which is not held until the last month, has lost its purpose and political importance.
According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2004 election, non-registered votes accounted for only 2 out of 5 total voters, but in the 2016 election, the proportion of non-registered votes increased to 4 out of 5. In the 2020 election, due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, the proportion of non-registered voters in the United States soared to 7 out of 3, which not only far exceeded the proportion of votes on Election Day, but also subverted the traditional rhythm of the American election campaign.
Although Trump, who lost the last election, has always had a lot of opinions about the credibility and implementation of absentee voting, in the 2020 election, more than 60% of Trump's votes still came from absentee voting, so when Trump successfully won the Republican nomination primary in early 2024, he continued to personally post to Biden, asking the other party to have one-on-one presidential debates with him as soon as possible.
In addition to the impact of absentee voting, the increasingly polarized political ecology in the United States has also significantly advanced the pace of bipartisan mobilization of voters to return to the team. The Pew Research Center cites the 2016 election as an example, with nearly 80 percent of voters deciding who they want to vote for before the debate, and only about 2 percent after the debate. Nearly 6 out of 5 voters decided which party they voted for before the bipartisan national convention, or the nomination process, was confirmed – in other words, even though the presidential debate helped voters understand a candidate's political views, it actually played a role in voting intentions too late to be influential.
Memes are the real battlefield? How Trump and Biden are preparing for the 2024 presidential debate
Trump, who is actively seeking debate, originally posted a proposal to the Biden team, hoping to hold 4 one-on-one presidential debates in a row between June ~ September, but Biden finally agreed to participate in only two, namely the "CNN" debate on June 27 and the "ABC" debate on September 10.
According to a memo obtained by Reuters, on the eve of the first debate held by CNN, each camp raised three priority debate issues that Trump wanted to prioritize - Trump's main topic is the Biden administration's incompetence in governance, and he wants to debate "immigration policy", "law and order", and "uncontrolled inflation"; Biden's tactics are to violently criticize Trump's constitutional, chaotic and extreme tendencies, and choose "abortion/abortion rights", "democratic crisis", and "economic policy" as priority themes.
But what issues do American voters in front of the TV care about? According to the Pew Research Center, the national policies that Americans are most concerned about in 2024 are the first to revitalize the economy (73%), followed by counterterrorism (63%), limiting political contributions (62%), reducing the burden of health care (60%), improving the quality of education (60%), strengthening the social welfare system (60%), reducing crime (58%), and controlling immigration (57%).
If we further break down the policy preferences of supporters of both parties, the three most important issues for Republican supporters are the economy, counterterrorism, and immigration control, while Democratic supporters reduce the burden of health care and limit political contributions and the economy. The issues of greatest disagreement between the two parties are climate change policies, environmental protection, and the control of migration.
Fifty-nine percent of Democratic voters think it's important, but only 12 percent of Republicans agree.
When it comes to defense foreign policy, counterterrorism (63 percent) is the most important issue for U.S. voters, followed by reducing the flow of drugs and illicit drugs into the U.S. (64 percent), stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (63 percent), maintaining U.S. military leadership (53 percent), stopping the spread of infectious diseases (52 percent), limiting Russia's influence (50 percent), and limiting China's influence (49 percent).
In addition to different political priorities, Trump and Biden have also adopted quite different styles and strategies in their preparations - as a veteran of political debates, Biden not only recalled former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, actively set up stage tactics and held mock debates, his strategy is to provoke Trump as much as possible, induce him to lose his temper in the live broadcast, and then let middle voters recall their disgust with the political chaos at the end of Trump's administration; Trump has always advocated that "over-preparation" will damage his political characteristics, so he insists on using a strong style of "being himself" to deal with his old rival Biden in an impromptu and improvisable manner.
The relatively conservative "Fox News" pointed out that in addition to the live broadcast stage on the day of the debate, Biden and Trump's respective "cyber air battles" will also become an important key to the momentum. Take the 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, for example, which attracted a record-breaking broadcast of more than 80.4 million American voters. According to the post-debate report released by YouTube, although the three debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump attracted a total of 350 million views on the Internet, which is the highest-watched political live broadcast in human history so far, the average viewing time of each viewer is only 22 minutes, and the discussion and dissemination on the Internet are also obviously fragmented and "memeticized".
The online media "Axios" believes that the purpose of the presidential debate is no longer a political discussion, but how to highlight the negative impression of the opponent and produce viral political memes, and the debate itself is only a library of election materials, "The debate between Trump and Biden will give birth to tens of millions of Internet memes, memes, lazy bags, TikTok short videos, and short videos made by the campaigns of both sides to attack their opponents."
Fox News highlighted that after three presidential debates in 2016, all polls showed that more than half of voters thought Hillary Clinton had performed well in the debate. But Trump, who is prone to personal attacks and controversial speeches during live broadcasts, has been able to use chaotic internet memes to create his own anti-establishment and unconventional dark horse appeal, which shows that the importance of presidential debates may not be to change voters' views, but to amplify political mobilization in the stratosphere.
"In a presidential debate, the candidates are not competing to win or lose," Fox News concluded, "and the real winner is who will win the dominant power to shape the views of the electorate through this political show."