Institution. We are here to talk about, do debates matter . We are one they away from the first president ial debate in one of the most intense, consequential elections in our lifetime. As we get ready to watch tomorrow night we thought it would be good to do three things. First we will look back at some of the history of debate, president ial debate history. Then we will turn to two experts on debate. Kathleen hall jamieson, the renowned scholar from the university of pennsylvania, one of the countrys foremost experts on media and politics and the founder of factcheck. Org. Schaefer, an experienced republican strategist and Media Consultant who has worked in many president ial campaigns including the campaign of mitt romney in 2012. In our third segment we will take questions from the audience. You can submit questions in the chat function or via twitter. At politics 2020 or via events at brookings. Edu. Lets have a look at the very first president ial debate between kennedy and neck than. Nixon. Here is a picture of them that shows really the problem. The very first televised president ial debate was between these two men in 1960. The idea did not come from the candidates or plug or parties, came from the networks. Kennedy quickly accepted. Nixon against the advice of many also accepted. It is now widely thought that 1960 debate was a disaster for nixon, who had been sick and who made no effort to cover up his 5 00 shadow and who looked bad compared to the tan and rested jack kennedy. As you can see in photographs, nixon is wiping sweat from his face. Those who heard the debate on radio thought nixon had one. Those who saw it on tv thought kennedy had one. The first president ial debate showed the incredible impact of television and added a new requirement to president ial candidates, that they be telegenic. 16 years passed between the first and second debate in 1976, when president gerald ford agreed to debate jimmy carter. That debate with an amendment from the Communications Act solidified the tradition and we have had debates ever since. It is not surprising some of the greatest debate moments ever were had by candidates and then president Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor, whose comfort in front of the cameras is legendary. But going into the Fall Campaign in 1980, reagan and carter were neck and neck in the polls. In the following clip from reagans 1980 debate against president jimmy carter, he asked the question that many think was responsible for his subsequent landslide victory. Are you better off today then you were four years ago . Next tuesday, all of you will go to the polls. We will stand there in a polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago . Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores then it was four years ago . Is there more or less unemployment in the country than four years ago . Is america as respected throughout the world as it was . You feel that our security is as safe, that lever are as strong as we were four years ago . And if you answer all of those is yes, then i think your choice is obvious who you will vote for. If you do not agree, if you do not think this course we have been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four years, then, i could suggest another choice you have. Four years later president reagan was running against jimmy carters Vice President walter mondale. In his first debate, things did not go so well. Reagan appeared old and confused in a performance that led many to wonder if he was too old for the job. But in his second debate, reagan had a memorable come back. Watch. [video clip] i want to raise an issue and cast it specifically in National Security terms. Youre the oldest president in history and some of your staff said you are tired after your recent encounter with mr. Mr. Mondale. I recall that president kennedy who had to go for days on end with little sleep during the cuba missile crisis, is there any doubt in your mind you would be able to function in such circumstances . Not at all. And i want you to know i will not make age an issue of the campaign. Im not going to exploit for applicable purposes, my opponents youth and inexperience. [laughter] [applause] in 1988, the Massachusetts GovernorMichael Dukakis was running against Vice President george h w bush. It was a close race. Dukakis was not helped when, in the second debate, he gave the following answer to moderator bernard shaw. Watch and see if you can see what is missing there. [video clip] governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable Death Penalty for the killer . No i do not, bernard. And i think that you know i have opposed the Death Penalty on my life. I do not see evidence it is a deterrent. I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We have done so in my state and it is one reason why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in america, why we have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in america. Michael dukakis was not the only president ial candidate to look insufficiently empathetic in a debate. Have a look at this photo from the 1992 debate, when president bush was caught checking his watch during an exchange with a woman who asked about the impact of the recession on him. Clintons warm response came as a stark contrast to bushs seeming indifference. Lets move onto the next photo, which shows sometimes you do not need to say anything to hurt your debate performance. During the 2000 debate between Vice President al gore and Texas Governor george w. George w. Bush, gore, thinking the camera was not on him, grimaced and sighed loudly while bush was talking. Saturday night live made merciless fun of him, as it has of many other politicians. And the satire, frankly, solidified the impression that gore was just rude and arrogant. And in his 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton, donald trump repeatedly invaded her space, keeping the camera on him and his looming presence. [no audio] hello everyone, can you hear me . Im back. Ok . Im back with our distinguished panelists after that tour of previous president ial debates. I thought i would start our discussion today with going to russ. As you know because you have been involved in them, as have i, right now, at this moment, presumably both trump and bided are seriously involved in something called debate prep. What is debate prep . Can you tell the audience, what happens . What is interesting is that debate prep starts in a normal campaign in a normal year at normal times debate prep starts often literally months in advance. Where the candidate will get the Team Together and start thinking about what questions could possibly be asked and what answers what they want to put together and give. I have been involved in a couple of debate preps where the candidate has literally had a notebook with a question and then their answer specifically laid out in that notebook, and they want to memorize their answers. That often starts sometimes two or three months in advance. I remember president bush, particularly in the 2000 campaign, started quietly preparing for debates as early as june. And there was secret debate prep sessions very very small number of people, to get him propped prepped for these debates because he realized and knew that it was going to be a big deal. And something he needed to perform well with. As you get closer, you start to have back and forth sessions with a staffer. They will throw questions out and try to get you to think on your feet quickly. And it will take news of the day and headlines of the day and throw them at you. Then as you get to the week before, you will have literally mock debate sessions, where you find someone to play your opponent. Back with mitt romney in 2012, rob portman was playing barack obama. And in the Vice President ial debate, ted olson was playing joe biden, which was a great choice. These can be as specific as you want, some can be around a Kitchen Table or conference table but in some cases you literally recreate a set, you have podiums exactly the distance they are going to be, exactly the height. You try to create game day situations. You have someone to play the moderator or moderators in the debate. You do a full run through for the hour or hour and a half, no breaks and no stops and come back and critique the performance afterwards. Dick cheney famously would want to have rehearsals at the exact same time the debate would be occurring. So he would have if the debate what occurred 8 00 at night he would want to have a full run through at 8 00 at night. There was probably no one more disciplined in the way he approached debate prep than Vice President cheney in 2000 and the 2004 campaign. Romney was a little bit of both. He liked to sit around and have conversations about policy and potential answers to questions , but when it came time to have a game day situation there was serious mock debates moving into the session and that is what normally happens. Other candidates want to sit around and toss questions out. Other candidates there was no discipline as to who is in the room. Our experience is that a small number of people is a much better debate than a large group. I have been in debate sessions where there are 15 plus people in the room, and as you know, anytime you get 15 more people in a room with a president ial candidate, everybody has to be the smartest person in the room. Everybody has to tell the candidate exactly how to answer the question, even if it has already been answered or was answered well. So these wind up becoming not particularly productive. I have seen candidates literally kick everybody out and then reestablish a debate practice, maybe an hour later, with a much smaller core of maybe three or four people. The other thing that we kind of like to start thinking about, kind of the strategy of the debate. What kind of debate you want . We always like to think of it as you want a hot debate, or a cold debate. If you are behind, you might want to be very aggressive with your opponent. You might want to try to get your opponent into an unforced error. A cool debate, you are ahead, you really dont want anything to happen. You want the News Headlines the next day to be candidates debate, candidates mix it up in cleveland. Those are the kinds of headlines that cool debates give you. Hot debate usually wind up having an outcome that can possibly change some votes even if it is just temporarily. It helps you kind of with the next three to five days in the news cycle. I also have heard over the years that sometimes the president ial candidates, if the standin opponent is doing a really good job, the candidate gets really mad at them and says that they are so in the role. [laughter] paul begala played george bush in the debate i was in with al gore. Al gore got really mad at him, like, all, how could you say these things . Paul would be george bush, so absolutely. We had a session once i will not say who the candidate was where we literally had to take a break and the candidate walked out of the room and we had to start a halfhour later and everybody had to say they were sorry, and we apologized and went back into it again. [laughter] exactly. Kathleen, you wrote a book about this a long time ago. You keep writing about media and the politics of communications. Where does the mastery of the media come in in a president ial debate . A lot of people say it is in the opening. The 1960 example where the presumption is that it was an advantage for nixon in radio and a disadvantage in television and the reverse for kennedy. One thing we need to say from a scholar standpoint is a study that was so small and in academic terms, so underpowered that it cannot establish that. , it is just intuitively it just one of those things that seems to be true. And you listen to the debates and what you see and something about how human process information. The visuals through which we communicate, the demeanor that you can see, the tone of voice that you can hear, they are all communicating things beyond what you can see on the transcript. So to the extent that they are consistent with the message that says competent, shares my values, trustworthy, that is beneficial for the candidate. Also because of television, and because debates in general are not just heard, they are seen. Television as a media has the capacity to do you in as a candidate. If you look at the split screen with trump and with clinton in 2016, trump knows he is on camera in split screen. He is grimacing, nodding, scowling, drawing attention away from Hillary Clintons answers. That is distracting and it is reframing. You saw it inadvertent in the 1960 campaign when the camera cuts away to nixon. And nixon is seen nodding as if he agrees with something kennedy is actually saying. To the extent that the median is the vehicle through which we see the debates, the candidates and the producers capacities to see what we are experiencing can eframe what we r are experiencing can affect how we perceive it in a different way than if he were sitting in a we were sitting in a live auditorium. Let me ask both of you i guess i will start with kathleen and go to russ. Do these debates matter . If you have to pick a debate where it seems like it had an impact on the subsequent vote, which one would you pick, or which two or three . I would pick 1976. It is interesting and complex. The question frame it for our viewers who might be younger than we are. The press cast an answer by gerald ford in 1970 x to question about soviet domination of eastern europe, as a gaffe. Max frankel who raised the question and repeatedly followed it up, implied that it was a mistake on fords part. And people who watched the debate before they saw made the commentarya afterwards made nothing of it. People who saw the media commentary perceived it was problematic before. That tells us that the Media Coverage of the debate, the medium interpretation framing of the debate can have an effect just like different exposure from the debate itself. The reason i would pick that as an example of the case in which it may have affected the outcome is for light in the polls immediately after the debate and he held his ground and said i ford fell in the polls immediately after the debate and he held his ground and said i did not make a mistake. He did articulate though poorly the policy that led president s had held over an extended period, that is they refused to grant the soviet unions right to be in eastern europe, and that is that the soviet union did not dominate, saying this is our policy and we will not grant it. And as the uprisings and the outcomes in poland illustrated, his position was vindicated historically. What ford was affirming the peoples right to sovereignty. So what you see is he failed to apologize for something about which he was not wrong. That is potentially a media effect. But nonetheless, he was closing on carter in the polls and had he continued to close at the rate he was before the debate, he would have won that election. Russ, can you think of one . Again, i dont know if it was a complete game changer, but i will talk about the one that i think we are most familiar with was in 2012, where you remember the first debate between mitt romney and president obama. Obama widely except that did not bring his a game nor his b again, and possibly brought his c game, and mitt romney was on fire. Mitt had had a very good, solid debate, and it really helped to the campaign with momentum moving forward. The second debate was kind of a push. The third debate was the Foreign Policy debate. That was the one where obama attacks romney for saying russia is our greatest geopolitical foe, where he said the 1960s called and they want the Foreign Policy back. At the time it was seen that obama really handed it to romney and he did. We saw the momentum, any momentum that we had moving into that had stopped, and it was the last debate, so the campaign was really set. These debates there are a couple big moments in campaign the conventions are one, nominating your Vice President is another. Debates are another where there where maybe the dynamic can change. And maybe it doesnt change completely, the trajectory of the race, but what it does is it changes it for a while. And being the last debate, that really changed the direction. It seems that obama had gotten the upper hand on romney in the last debate, and for the next two and half, three weeks, then we had hurricane sandy, and it was just starting for romney to start going down. Our polling showed that we were very competitive to that point, and after that, we never were waiting in the state that we needed to win. Never by enough anyway. That would be the one that i would point to. It is interesting. We have seen incumbent president s. Sometimes they screw up their first debate, and i wonder if it is a we had obama, we had bush i think you could say gerald ford. I think you could probably say jimmy carter in the debate against reagan. And reagan in 1984. That is right, reagan in 1984. I wonder what that is. Is it they feel like there are , so many other important things to do, why do i have to sit in here in this room with my aids aides for two days and answer questions and, you know, they probably resist doing the sort of debate prep that they should be doing. Well it is very different. As you know, when youre in a campaign over a long period with a candidate, maybe even a governor or a senator or a Vice President , there is an ability, there is a familiarity that you forth aback and , giveandtake. You are not sitting with the guy and all of a sudden who is the candidate or the woman who is the candidate who might have been the senator or governor. Youre are now sitting with the president of the United States and you are having to give the president of the United States, to criticize his or her record in a way that you know, they , they do not like to hear, that they are not used to hearing, and so, you know, i think you pull your punches. Punches are pooled an