Do Debates Make a Difference?
Looking at the history of presidential debates and their influence.


Michael Barone




There were three more Nixon–Kennedy debates that year and then no more until 1976. Since then, there have been 23 presidential debates and eight vice-presidential debates, with three more presidentials this year, including last night’s, and one more vice presidential.


They each had a disadvantage, as well, as relatively young men in a nation whose presidents over the preceding 18 years had been in their sixties or seventies.

The front-runners over the next 16 years saw no advantage in debating their opponents. In 1964 and 1972, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon respectively were overwhelming favorites and didn’t want to give their opponents equal standing on a television set. And 1968 was a three-way race, which Nixon initially led, but neither he nor Hubert Humphrey wanted to share the stage with the shrewd segregationist demagogue George Wallace.

In 1976, things were different. The incumbent president, Gerald Ford, was far behind in polls, and Democrats had a two-to-one lead in party identification. He could hope that his superior knowledge would shine against a former one-term governor of Georgia.



Other debate gaffes have become famous over the years: Jimmy Carter’s citing his 13-year-old daughter’s concern about nuclear proliferation in 1980; Dan Quayle’s comparing himself with John Kennedy in 1988; Al Gore’s loud sighs and menacing body language in 2000.

Less well remembered were the steady performances by the two female vice-presidential nominees, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sarah Palin in 2008, neither of whom had much national political experience.


That was when debates became institutionalized. Reagan, though far ahead in the polls, felt obliged to debate. In 1987, a presidential-debates commission, chaired by former national-party chairmen, was created. It’s been setting the rules, subject to approval by the candidates, ever since.

Do debates make a difference? Maybe they did in 1960, maybe they did when Ford tripped up on Eastern Europe, maybe they did when Reagan asked if voters were better off than they were four years before.

Recent evidence seems more nuanced. Gallup polls before and after debates tell us that Bill Clinton lost ground in the 1992 debate period and gained some in the 1996 one. George W. Bush picked up support in the 2000 debate period but slipped in the 2004 one.






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