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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The writer is professor of history at Purdue University and author of ‘24/7 Politics’
Pundits and instant polls largely agree: on Tuesday, US vice-president Kamala Harris won the presidential debate over former president Donald Trump — and it wasn’t close. While introducing her agenda to the nation, she also managed to deliver the critique of Trump that President Joe Biden struggled to articulate in June. The question is will Harris’s debate performance move the polls longer-term and help springboard her to victory?
History shows the answer is both yes, and no. Even though the debate is done, the battle over its meaning has barely begun. Winning that battle matters, and not just when it comes to determining who will become president.
The first televised presidential debate happened in 1960 when a two-term senator from Massachusetts, John F Kennedy, took on the vice-president, Richard Nixon. From the beginning, Kennedy had launched a media-savvy campaign, one that wove together TV commercials, pop songs, and radio spots. It was a controversial strategy, none other than the Democratic matriarch Eleanor Roosevelt criticised Kennedy for spending so much money. And yet, Kennedy understood that the new medium of television offered a potentially different path to power.
He presciently saw the debate as an opportunity to speak to TV viewers, not a policy battle. Nixon, however, approached it as just another campaign event and appeared under the weather with a grey suit and five o’clock shadow. The image of him wiping a 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.
No empirical evidence supports this much-touted myth. And yet Nixon and others blamed TV debates for ushering in a world where politicians focused on style over substance. Their laments only heightened the perceived power of the medium, opening new political careers for those with the skills to master it. Since then, it has been clear to those eyeing 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 to him stepping out of the 2024 race.
Indeed, after Kennedy’s triumph, candidates skirted debates for another 16 years. Then, in 1976, incumbent Gerald Ford challenged the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, in hopes of bolstering his struggling campaign.
The run-up to these debates was quite different. Both sides prepared texts and discussed the image they wanted to project with a team of media professionals. The goal? To avoid any unscripted moment that could derail their campaigns. One befell Ford anyway when he stated that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination. While he intended to imply that he didn’t recognise the legitimacy of Soviet rule, Carter pounced, “I would like to see Mr Ford convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans, and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.”
Initially, voters were indifferent. But, over the next days, journalists peppered Ford with questions about it while Carter used it in stump speeches as proof of the president’s incompetence in foreign affairs. Historical memory quickly forgot Carter’s role in igniting the story. Instead, it became 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, lest journalists have the power to do so. By 1988, a backroom known as “Spin Alley” had emerged, where staffers inundated reporters with interpretations as to why their guy won.
This week, Trump surprised everyone by appearing in the spin room, something candidates rarely do. But perhaps we should not have been surprised. He is a quintessential product of these historical changes that have made performance such a key credential, even as he has rebelled against the carefully constructed image machinery.
Like Kennedy before him, Trump recognises the opportunity presented by a new medium: in his case by tapping into a social media environment that props up his outlandish statements and helps him advance what his team celebrate as “alternative facts”. Over the past eight years, he has gone further down this hole in the effort to reclaim power.
On Tuesday this was on clear display as he espoused ridiculous statements about abortion, shady deals with foreign figures and, most memorably, illegal immigrants eating pets. Since then, Trump has refused to do another debate: he seems to be banking on misinformation to carry the day. For now, the post-debate narrative has been dominated by a battery of entertaining memes that intentionally blur the line between fact and fiction. But its longer-term impact on American politics will play out for some time to come.
