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The stories that matter about money and politics in the race for the White House
The author is a professor of history at Purdue University and author of ’24/7 Politics’.
The pundits and the instant polls largely agree: On Tuesday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential debate against former President Donald Trump — and it wasn’t by a narrow margin. While she laid out her agenda for the nation, she also managed to voice the criticism of Trump that President Joe Biden struggled to articulate in June. The question is: Will Harris’ debate performance move the polls in the long run and help propel her to victory?
History shows that the answer is yes and no. While the debate is over, the battle over its meaning has only just begun. Winning that battle is important, and not just when it comes to determining who will be president.
The first televised presidential debate took place in 1960, when John F. Kennedy, a two-term senator from Massachusetts, faced off against Vice President Richard Nixon. From the start, Kennedy had launched a media-heavy campaign, combining television ads, pop songs, and radio spots. It was a controversial strategy, with Democratic matriarch Eleanor Roosevelt herself criticizing Kennedy for spending so much money. And yet Kennedy understood that the new medium of television offered a potentially different path to power.
Nixon, with prescient vision, saw the debate as an opportunity to speak to television viewers, not a political battle. Yet Nixon approached it as just another campaign event, showing up in a gray suit and a five-year beard. The image of him mopping his sweaty brow has become famous, as has the conventional wisdom: Kennedy’s more telegenic image helped him win the debate and, with it, the presidency.
There is no empirical evidence to support this widely spread myth. And yet Nixon and others blamed televised debates for ushering in a world in which politicians They focused on style over substance. Their laments only increased the perceived power of the medium, opening up new political careers for those with the skills to master it. Since then, it has become clear to those with their eyes on the White House that television must be a political priority. Biden’s recent catastrophic performance in his debate with Trump reinforced this — it sparked the concerns that led him to leave office. Race 2024.
In fact, after Kennedy’s victory, the candidates avoided debates for another 16 years. Then, in 1976, incumbent President Gerald Ford challenged Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter in the hope of bolstering his ailing campaign.
The preparation for these debates was very different. Both sides prepared texts and discussed the image they wanted to project with a team of media professionals. The goal? To avoid any unforeseen moments that could derail their campaigns. One of them occurred to Ford anyway when he stated that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination. Although he intended to imply that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, Carter pounced: “I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish-Americans, the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that these countries do not live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.”
At first, voters were indifferent, but in the days that followed, reporters bombarded Ford with questions about it, while Carter used it in his campaign speeches as proof of the president’s incompetence on foreign policy. Carter’s role in triggering the story was quickly forgotten in historical memory. Instead, it was perceived as a moment when reporters turned a misstatement into a devastating “gaffe.”
The lesson was clear: Post-debate media narratives mattered, and campaigns needed dedicated workers to craft them, so journalists didn’t have the power to do so. By 1988, a secret room known as “Spin Alley” had emerged, where staffers inundated reporters with interpretations of why their candidate had won.
This week, Trump surprised everyone by appearing in the press room, something candidates rarely do. But perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. He’s a quintessential product of these historic shifts that have made performance such a key credential, even as he has rebelled against the carefully constructed image machinery.
Like Kennedy before him, Trump recognizes the opportunity offered by a new medium — in his case, by taking advantage of a social media environment that supports his outlandish claims and helps him promote what his team celebrates as “alternative facts.” Over the past eight years, he has been digging deeper into that hole in his effort to regain power.
On Tuesday, this was on full display when he made ridiculous statements about abortion, shady deals with foreign personalities and, most memorably, illegal immigrants eating pets. Trump has since refused to participate in another debate – he appears to be banking on misinformation to win. For now, the post-debate narrative has been dominated by a series of entertaining memes that intentionally blur the line between fact and fiction. But their long-term impact on American politics will be apparent for some time to come.