The Biden campaign is right not to defer to the Commission on Presidential Debates

The Republican-led Commission has done its job badly for decades -- and the GOP already rejected it.

Today the Biden campaign announced President Biden’s intention to debate Donald Trump twice in debates “hosted by news organizations” but outside the framework proposed by the supposedly-nonpartisan (more on that in a minute) Commission on Presidential Debates, setting off a flurry of indignant tweets from the kind of pundits who aim performative indignation at Democrats in order to carefully position themselves in the consciousness of their fellow pundits as perfectly “balanced.” It’s all a bunch of nonsense, Joe Biden is right to blow off the Commission’s proposal, and you should regard with great skepticism those portraying this as some grave assault on democracy.

Nonsense

The Biden campaign’s stated reasons for disagreeing with the CPD plan are unassailable.

According to Biden Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, “The Commission’s schedule has debates that begin after the American people have a chance to cast their vote early, and doesn't conclude until after tens of millions of Americans will have already voted.” Indeed, the Commission proposed three presidential debates, two of which would occur after votes had already been cast in a dozen states, including potential swing states like Minnesota, Virginia, Ohio, and Arizona. The concept of “Election Day” as a single specific day is outdated: More than 80 percent of all states now allow votes to be cast before “Election Day,” which is now properly understood as the last day on which a voter can cast a vote, not the day. As O’Malley Dillon noted, the Commission is “out of step with changes in the structure of our elections and the interests of voters.”

O’Malley Dillon further explained: “The Commission includes rules that candidates were called upon to follow, and yet it was unable or unwilling to enforce the rules in the 2020 debates. The result was far from-indeed entirely inconsistent with— the orderly and informative process the voters deserved in 2020 and should be able to expect in 2024.” This is a big one: In 2020, the Commission set rules that “specif[ied] that each candidate gets two minutes to respond to questions posed to them by the moderator as well as time to respond to one another.” But it made no real effort to enforce those rules for the first debate, which Trump spent trampling. As the BBC noted at the time, “President Trump constantly interrupted Democratic candidate Joe Biden leading to a series of chaotic exchanges in which both men talked over each other.”

Despite the fact that Trump interrupting opponents was a hallmark of his 2016 debate performances, the Commission completely failed to put in place a mechanism for enforcing its rules. The Fox News host the Commission chose to moderate that first 2020 debate later claimed “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.” Who could possibly foreseen that Donald Trump’s approach to the 2020 presidential debates would be precisely the same as Donald Trump’s approach to the 2016 presidential debates?

The Commission’s failure to prepare for the obvious and failure to enforce its own rules is a pretty good reason not to defer to it.

Then there’s the fact that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have already refused to go along with the CPD. In 2020, Trump actually skipped a CPD-scheduled debate, and in 2022 the Republican National Committee “voted unanimously to have the party nominee pull out of debates with the organization.”

And yet pundits like Nate Silver¹ and Ian Bremmer pretend Joe Biden is breaking some “norm” by not agreeing to a debate proposal from a Commission the opposing party has already said it won’t go along with. It’s all just so much nonsense — particularly since the Biden campaign’s debate conditions better serve both voters and democracy than does the Commission’s proposal. Here’s O’Malley Dillon again:

[L]et me be clear about our intentions. We believe the first debate should be in late June, after Donald Trump's New York criminal trial is likely to be over and after President Biden returns from meeting with world leaders at the G7 Summit. It should be hosted by any broadcast organization that hosted a Republican Primary debate in 2016 in which Donald Trump participated, and a Democratic primary debate in 2020 in which President Biden participated - so neither campaign can assert that the sponsoring organization is obviously unacceptable: if both candidates have previously debated on their airwaves, then neither could object to such venue. The debates should be one-on-one, allowing voters to compare the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College - and not squandering debate time on candidates with no prospect of becoming President. The moderators should be selected by the broadcast host from among their regular personnel, so as to avoid a ‘ringer’ or partisan. There should be firm time limits for answers, and alternate turns to speak - so that the time is evenly divided and we have an exchange of views, not a spectacle of mutual interruption. A candidate's microphone should only be active when it is his turn to speak, to promote adherence to the rules and orderly proceedings. […] A second presidential debate should be held in early September at the start of the fall campaign season, early enough to influence early voting, but not so late as to require the candidates to leave the campaign trail in the critical late September and October period.

That all makes a heck of a lot more sense than the CPD’s history of scheduling debates for after voting is already underway and of making no real effort to enforce debate rules. There’s nothing to complain about — and, indeed, the two campaigns have already agreed to two debates.

More broadly: The Commission on Presidential Debates is bad at its job and has been for a very long time. I won’t quote from Dan Pfeiffer’s 2020 excellent takedown of the Commission because it is worth reading in full. To it I will add that Janet Brown, who has been the executive director of the Commission for every day of its 37 years of existence, is a Republican who worked in the Reagan administration.² If you’re going to have a debate commission led by representatives of the two major political parties, as is the fundamental premise behind the CPD, the executive director should rotate (or should be a joint post) — it certainly shouldn’t be led every day of every year for its entire existence by a Republican. Maybe that had something to do with the Commission’s selection of Bob Schieffer, a longtime golfing buddy of George W. Bush whose brother was Bush’s business partner, to moderate a 2004 presidential debate between Bush and John Kerry? Nah, probably a coincidence.

In 2016, Brown told CNN that debate moderators shouldn’t fact-check candidates’ false statements suggesting that even the unemployment rate is subjective:

Janet Brown, executive director of the commission, which organizes the debates every four years, said on CNN's “Reliable Sources” that “I don't think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Once the fact-checking door is open, “I'm not sure, what is the big fact, and what is a little fact?” She added, “Does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?”

Trump campaign aides have staked out a similar position. Some of them say a pro-fact-checking stance is really an anti-Trump stance.

Again, probably a coincidence that the Republican nominee is the biggest liar in the history of American politics.

Then there’s yet another way Janet Brown and the CPD let the Trump campaign break the rules in 2020 — one that could have had deadly consequences:

Donald Trump tested positive for Covid three days before that first 2020 debate, and again two days after. That positive Covid test prior to the debate³ violated CPD rules, which required the candidates to test negative for 72 hours prior to the event. And then CPD allowed Trump’s family and guests to violate its rules on audience masking.⁴

The Commission on Presidential Debates has been run by a Republican for 37 consecutive years, it is wildly out of touch with both the mechanics and information environment of modern American elections,⁵ and it has regularly favored Republican candidates by allowing them to break CPD rules and by installing FOX News hosts and GOP nominees’ golfing buddies as moderators. On top of which, Trump and the GOP have already walked away from the CPD despite the Commission’s overt favoritism towards them. The Biden campaign was right to reject the Commission’s absurd debate schedule. Pundits who decry the move are telling on themselves.

1. When Trump skipped the second CPD debate in 2020, Silver didn’t denounce him for breaking any “norms” — instead he portrayed it as a savvy strategic move. I can find no record of Silver having said anything about the RNC’s 2022 rejection of the CPD.

2. News companies routinely report on Trump/GOP claims that the CPD is biased against them without noting that in fact the CPD is and has always been led by a Republican. Just another way in which the news media privileges Republican complaints of anti-Republican bias while ignoring both objective facts and progressive complaints of pro-Republican bias.

3. We didn’t find out about the first positive test until a year later, though it hardly came as a surprise

4. When news broke after the debate that Trump tested positive for Covid, the New York Times quickly turned it into a story about Joe Biden being “cagey” about his health:

5. Want another indication the Commission is stuck in the past? Take a look at its website, with a design that was out of date twenty years ago:

That isn’t from the Wayback machine, that’s a screenshot from today. May 15, 2024.