Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - 21

parently did want to talk about: his record on violent crime as governor and his views about the war on drugs. His response was judged inadequately emotional, given that the question referenced his own wife. The postmortem in U.S. News & World Report said, “The governor couldn’t summon a hint of emotion in his response to a jarring hypothetical question about the death penalty for someone who had just raped and killed his wife.” But voters couldn’t summon a hint of emotion about this alleged gaffe. Gallup reports that the two 1988 debates had “little to no impact on voter preferences.” Stimson estimates that these debates might have added a point to Bush’s margin, which would have only widened his lead, not handed him the election. In 1992, George Bush’s glances at his watch in the October 15 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot have been characterized, in one account, as a “display of impatience” that “seemed to speak volumes.” Once again, that gaffe—and, in fact, all of the debates in 1992—had only a small impact on Bush’s standing. According to Thomas Holbrook’s detailed study, the second debate may have cost Bush only about 2 points. If anything, these debates mainly served to increase Perot’s standing at the expense of Clinton’s— although Perot’s rise could also be attributed to other factors, including his own thirty-minute campaign ads during this period. This brings us to 2000, which is a clearer case of a small, but consequential, debate effect. Al Gore’s performance in the first debate—with its interruptions of George W. Bush and audible sighs— was widely lampooned and is also considered by some to be one of the “biggest blunders” in the history of presidential debates. After the debate, there was a swing of 2 or 3 points toward Bush, enough to give him a narrow lead. Erikson and Wlezien estimate that after all of the debates, Gore’s poll standing was about 2 points lower than it was before. Among the many factors that influenced the outcome of the 2000 election, the debates appear to have been one.

ut, even in 2000, this focus on presidential debates obscures an important point: debates aren’t the only thing that voters are hearing and seeing in the weeks before the election. So even a careful comparison of polls before and after a debate assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that any change was due to the debate itself or to news coverage about the debate—and not to other events, television advertising, or the like. Moreover, other events may outweigh any debate effect. The 1980 election provides one example. After the debate and before the election, all of the following took place: prominent aides to both Reagan and Carter were forced to resign; economic data was released showing rising inflation; there was continued news coverage of the congressional investigation of Carter’s brother, Billy; and, finally, Carter was again rebuffed by Iran in his attempts to negotiate the release of the American hostages who had been held for a year. The Carter campaign’s internal polling showed Carter slipping even more after the setback in Iran than he appeared to be after the debate. “It was all related to the hostages and events overseas,” said Carter’s pollster, Patrick Caddell. Reagan’s larger-thanexpected victory appeared to confirm that there was a late trend in his favor. Whether these events definitively hurt Carter in the closing days of the campaign is as difficult to determine as whether the debate helped Reagan. But the broader point remains: presidential campaigns present voters with a steady stream of information that may overshadow the debates. A month ago, Obama’s advisers declared that they expect Mitt Romney to get “a surge of positive media attention and a boost in the opinion polls after the first presidential debate.” That may or may not prove true. What history can tell us is that presidential debates, while part of how the game is played, are rarely what decide the game itself.

ELI T E D OW N TOW N

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University

John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, blogs at the Monkey Cage and the Washington Monthly. Thanks go to Jessica Burnell, Robert Erikson, and Christopher Wlezien for their assistance.

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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