AHC: 1960--the first (and last!) presidential debates

AHC: The tradition of presidential (general election [1]) debates begins *and ends* in 1960. That is certainly the way it looked in 1964, 1968, and 1972...

And no, the "equal time" rule (which made debates impractical by requiring that minor party candidates be included) and the FCC's eventual decision to get around it by saying the networks could cover debates as a "news event" are not the central issue here. Congress could always suspend the rule, and if it refused to do so, everyone would know that meant that the candidate whose party had a majority in Congress didn't want to debate. The real key to the revival of debates in 1976 was that you had an incumbent president who was way behind in the polls and therefore--unlike LBJ in 1964 and candidate Nixon in 1968 and President Nixon in 1972--wanted a debate and a challenger who was sure he could outperform the president. Under other circumstances, one could easily see no debates in 1976. And even after the debates in 1976, it was not clear that the tradition of debates would continue. Even in 1980, Carter skipped the first debate because of the inclusion of John Anderson. What if the League of Women Voters had also insisted on including Anderson in the second debate and Carter had skipped again? And what if in 1984 Reagan had decided that with his lead over Mondale, he had nothing to gain and potentially much to lose from a debate?

The fact is, the more debates there were, the more "unthinkable" it became for front-runners to dodge a debate. The fewer debates, the more "thinkable" dodging them would become.

[1] For primaries, there was of course the Dewey-Stassen one-issue debate ("should the Communist Party be outlawed?") of 1948 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey–Stassen_debate (the last Republican primary debate until 1980) and the Stevenson-Kefauver debate of 1956.
 
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There are two forces I see. One is the force of the television age. The other is the force of the respect of the presidency. The former did and would push for televised debates, as everything felt like it needed to be televised. In addition, television is transparency, and television was a direct connection to the average American. The other force pushes for the idea that political office should be held in such regard that televised debates are not necessary, and may indeed be beneath the office. I feel that attitude could continue so long as the political candidates held it up. After all, there's only two people (of note) running every four years. Rarely, there's a third of note. It is not necessarily going to be the case that any of them want a televised debate.
 
In my NdfA TL no debates were held in 1976. And I'll give a spoiler; there won't be any debates in 1980 either.
 
I was going to do a "WI no presidential debates" thread myself. And the POD was going to be no debates in 1976.

The 1960 ones would have stood as a "one off". While I think the impact itself is exaggerated, the debates did help Kennedy, and the election was so close that changing anything that helped Kennedy puts Nixon over the top. So the butterflies from that would be considerable.

I don't think the POD is that difficult to produce. Carter, sitting on a large lead in the polls, doesn't debate, and the precedent is set. He also doesn't debate in 1980, and it isn't until 2000 that you get an election campaign when one candidate isn't sitting on a large polling lead after the convention (maybe 1988, but that was a strange election where the Dukakis campaign frittered away a huge lead in the polls in the summer by essentially not campaigning). The 1960 debates are viewed as an interesting one off, and on occasion good government types suggest reviving them. These proposals are ignored just like all the other good government proposals.

There were only a couple of 1960 style superclose elections after 1976, the 1976 elections themselves and 2000. The first question is whether this impacts the 1976 elections themselves. While the debates are mainly remembered for Ford's Poland gap, he did erase a large Carter lead in the polls so maybe the net effect of the debates was to help him. And in the post-Watergate period, Carter takes a hit for not agreeing to debate Ford. Maybe this is enough, plus the lack of the Poland gaffe, to swing the election to Ford after all?

However, in 2000 the debates seem to have been a wash in terms of their impact on the campaign.

One other election where the debates might have changed the results are the 1992 debates. By giving a big boost to Perot, and a platform of Perot's criticism of GHW Bush, the net effect was to hurt Bush vs Clinton. The popular vote margin wound up being 5%, so no debates and a weaker Perot may turn out to be enough to get Bush re-elected.

There are two areas where the post-1976 debates were different than the 1960 debates. The first was that it was standard to have more than one debate. The effect of this was to enable a front-runner who had "lost" the first debate to make adjustments and fix things in the second debate, notably in 1984 and 2012. This reduced the impact of the debates. The second was the inclusion of a Vice Presidential debate. I don't think these had a huge impact, though its interesting to note that for whatever reason the Democrats have tended to do somewhat better in these.

Incidentally, I tested this out with the Campaign Trail game on Normal difficulty. I ran as Carter, doing by best to win otherwise but not agreeing to the debates. The effect was a collapse in the polls for Carter, though not as badly as from the Playboy interview. I had to pander to Jewish voters to shore up Carter's position in New York, which I normally avoid doing. The end result was Carter winning the popular vote, 49.6% to 48.5%, but losing the election in the Electoral College, 257 to 281, with Ohio, Wisconsin, and Hawaii flipping to Ford compared with the OTL result. Of course randomness is built into the Campaign Trail scenarios, so its not a great test. Here is the link:

https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/campaign-trail/game/298587
 
I assume "Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot==>everyone dies" is considered cheating?

Because I can't help but think that otherwise, you're eventually going to get the news networks demanding it, and some candidate who feels a debate will be in their interest will back them.
 
Off topic, but the Campaign Game result I just posted, with Carter not agreeing to the debates as the POD, would make a start of a good timeline. Ford loses the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College, carrying Ohio by 646 votes! Coming two years after Watergate, that would have produced an amendment abolishing the Electoral College at the least.
 
Off topic, but the Campaign Game result I just posted, with Carter not agreeing to the debates as the POD, would make a start of a good timeline. Ford loses the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College, carrying Ohio by 646 votes! Coming two years after Watergate, that would have produced an amendment abolishing the Electoral College at the least.

I think Carter would have been hurt more than that by refusing to debate.

The easiest way is to stop Watergate from happening so that people are less concerned about government openness.
 
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