Prof. Richard Thomas
Head of the School of Culture and Communication at Swansea University. He is co-author of “Reporting Elections: Rethinking the logic of Campaign Coverage” (2018, Polity), and was Co-I on an ESRC project about Alternative Political Media.
Email: richard.h.thomas@swansea.ac.uk
Dr. Matthew Wall
Head of Politics, Philosophy, and International Relations at Swansea University. He has published extensively about the intersection of the internet and election campaigns and is Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data.
Email: m.t.wall@swansea.ac.uk
U.S. Election 2024
78. Momentum is a meme (Prof Ryan M. Milner)
79. Partisan memes and how they were perceived in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey, Dr Daniel Lane)
80. The intersection of misogyny, race, and political memes... America has a long way to go, baby! (Dr Gabriel B. Tait)
81. Needs Musk: Trump turns to the manosphere (Dr Michael Higgins, Prof Angela Smith)
82. “Wooing the manosphere: He’s just a bro.” Donald Trump’s digital transactions with "dude" influencers (Prof Mark Wheeler)
83. Star supporters (Prof John Street)
84. Pet sounds: Celebrity, meme culture and political messaging in the music of election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
85. The stars came out for the 2024 election. Did it make a difference? (Mark Turner)
86. Podcasting as presidential campaign outreach (Ava Kalinauskas, Dr Rodney Taveira)
87. Value of TV debates reduced during Trump era (Prof Richard Thomas, Dr Matthew Wall)
88. America’s “fun aunt”: How gendered stereotypes can shape perceptions of women candidates (Dr Caroline Leicht)
We can’t be certain whether the single presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had much impact on the outcome of the 2024 election. Certainly, most called it as a victory for Harris, her answers seemingly more coherent than her opponent’s. Trump’s victory though, suggests that he learned from the experience and that his campaign was more effective thereafter.
If election strategists knew what had the greatest impact on the voting public, then of course, campaigns would become instantly more polarised and focused. In a fragmented, proliferated contemporary media landscape, “influence” might be wielded via a complex combination of messages across platforms. But ever since the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy in 1960, they have been thought to have had some say in the final result. The first debate 65 years ago might not have been pivotal, but the BBC suggested that it certainly “accelerated Democratic support for Kennedy”, who eventually went on to become president.
On that occasion, a wan-faced Nixon came up short versus his tanned, urbane opponent and suddenly, what you looked like in front of a TV camera seemed just as important as what you said. This was confirmed by Conservative MP Ian Gow in the first televised speech in the UK parliament in 1989, when he repeated an image consultant’s assertion that while “the impression you make on television depends mainly on your image (55%)” and your voice and body language accounted for 38%, only 7% depends on “what you are actually saying”.
So perhaps we can assume that these debates do actually matter (even as only visual touchpoints), given that they are actually scheduled in the first place, that Donald Trump refused to do a second one in 2024, and that they draw such a huge audience. Indeed, over 67 million watched the debate in September 2024, but even this fell short of the first Clinton/Trump event in 2016, when 84 million tuned in.
The semiotics of the visual event aside, these debates offer a chance for voters to identify differences between the wider visions and detailed policies of each candidate. After all, policy coverage – or the lack of it – is the hardy annual of scholarship considering how elections are covered. Most empirical studies would reveal that the trials and tribulations of everyday campaigning usually overwhelm the details of who would do what in office, and how.
So TV debates provide a real-time opportunity to make these policy pledges and to add some detail, and to offer candidates the chance to speak to less politically engaged voters who don’t routinely follow American politics.
But TV debates might also be problematic. The complete focus of attention on the party figurehead – the “presidentialization” of political coverage – is recognised by scholars and commentators as shining undue light on the candidates’ personalities, appearance and idiosyncrasies.
Presidentialization also marginalises any wider party machinery, and other politicians likely to wield considerable power within any new administration. Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 contest amid concerns about his health and cognitive ability, and there have been similar concerns about Trump. So knowing who – in extreme circumstances – might end up as a stand-in to the president seems increasingly important.
The other danger, we suggest, is perhaps more specific to the Trump era of American politics. When one candidate comes from reality TV and is a celebrity-turned-politician rather than the other way around, it seems inevitable that delivery and performance will always prevail over content in these televised debates.
But while the style over substance imbalance is perhaps inevitable, the way that Trump has essentially reduced political debate to its lowest common denominator is not. While Nixon and Kennedy had clear ideological differences, their interchanges were courteous and polite meaning that their policies remained the focus. Trump’s insulting behaviour was clear during the debate and has been prominent in the campaign more widely. Moreover, with political scientists in Tennessee suggesting that Harris was almost matching Trump insult for insult, we argue that their value has been reduced to the extent that they are now unpleasant public “roasts” rather than useful points of reference for voters wanting to be better informed. While Harris’s strategy made some sense when set against her opponent’s emphasis on “owning” his opponent through direct insults, not many politicians will skew debate strategy to the extent that Donald Trump has.
Trump’s victory in 2024 means that it’s unlikely that the quality of political debate will improve. Trading barbs has been a successful strategy and so why would he change it? Whether he succeeds in his bid to “Make America Great Again” at his second attempt remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely that “making political debate great again” will be anywhere on his to-do-list.