The day after every leaders’ televised election debate, there are three questions everyone ought to ask:
First: What was the clip, the defining soundbite, positive or negative?
Second: What were the overnights, how many people watched, how many voters were undecided?
Third, and most important: Who won?
Everything else is noise.
Going into the first U.S. presidential debate Monday night, expectations were that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would draw 100 million viewers. Super Bowl numbers.
There was never any doubt that Clinton would come prepared; some Democrats were worried that she would be over-prepared. The wild card was always the question of which Trump would show up — the insult-spewing reality show host or a serious candidate for president of the United States.
Another unknown factor was whether the debate moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, would play a role in calling out Trump on his factual misstatements and outright lies, or whether that would be Clinton’s job.
In the end, it probably didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference. It’s not as if the mainstream media hasn’t done exhaustive fact-checking on Trump in recent weeks. In Sunday’s New York Times, there was a full page in the Weekly Review section with an eight-column headline: “A Week of Whoppers from Trump”.
Trump’s talk radio eruptions only drive his ratings, his unpredictability reinforcing his supporters’ sense of him as authentic. It was Clinton, going in, who had authenticity issues, reinforcing her trust problems with voters.
One advantage Clinton took into the first debate is that she’s accustomed to debating one-on-one, going back to the Democratic primaries against Barack Obama in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016. Trump, for his part, started against 16 opponents for the Republican nomination, and trash-talked most of them off the stage.
Last night was different. He can’t insult his way to the White House.
So there was lots of pressure on both of them last night as they walked onto the stage at Hofstra University in suburban New York. On Monday the polls were deadlocked and way too close to call in the Electoral College of the states. The battleground states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and so on — are also statistical dead heats.
We’ve seen television debates that arguably changed the course of elections. We saw nothing like those moments in last night’s tilt.
So how did they do?
Well, there were no knockout blows on either side. They both survived.
There was no dominant clickbait, no defining soundbite. Numbers? Check with the networks. Best clip? There isn’t one. Who won? CNN poll responders thought Clinton won by a 61-27 margin. But no knockout.
The TV networks were calling the first Clinton-Trump debate the most important since the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in September 1960, 56 years ago. It’s interesting, looking at the tape of that debate (it’s on YouTube), how primitive it looks today — not only in terms of production values but in terms of content.
It was in black and white, with only three cameras in a Chicago studio shooting from behind the heads of a panel of four journalists. The moderator, Howard K. Smith, was sitting behind a little teacher’s desk, and at the end of the debate had to do a shout-out to the floor director asking how much time each candidate had for his closing statement. (The answer was about three minutes.)
Both Kennedy and Nixon spoke of “medical care for the aged”. Medicare wasn’t then in the vocabulary. On education, Kennedy pointed out that “a Negro boy” had only one-third the opportunity of a white kid to graduate from high school and go on to university.
The conventional wisdom of the day, and the legend ever since, was that Kennedy won the first debate, which propelled him to the presidency in an election he won by just over 100,000 votes.
But when you watch the video, it’s clear that Nixon held his own, except for perspiring profusely on camera. The legend has it that he had a “five o’clock shadow”; that’s not apparent on the tape. Voters who saw the debate on television thought Kennedy won, while a majority of those who listened on radio thought Nixon did.
We’ve seen television debates since that arguably changed the course of elections. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won on two soundbites against the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. First, Reagan asked Americans whether they were “better off than (they) were four years ago.” Then, in an exchange over health care, he shot down Carter with his signature quip: “There you go again.”
Here at home, we had the watershed election debate of 1984. “You had an option, sir,” Brian Mulroney thundered at John Turner during an exchange on patronage appointments. Then there was Turner in the 1988 leaders debate, engaging Mulroney on free trade with a single sentence: “I believe you have sold us out.”
Never underestimate the effect of election debates. Remember the 2015 Alberta campaign, when in the leaders’ debate Progressive Conservative Premier Jim Prentice suggested “math was difficult” for NDP leader Rachel Notley. Prentice got an unwelcome lesson in electoral math just two weeks later.
We saw nothing like those moments in last night’s tilt. Six weeks to go — still too close to call.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
First: What was the clip, the defining soundbite, positive or negative?
Second: What were the overnights, how many people watched, how many voters were undecided?
Third, and most important: Who won?
Everything else is noise.
Going into the first U.S. presidential debate Monday night, expectations were that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would draw 100 million viewers. Super Bowl numbers.
There was never any doubt that Clinton would come prepared; some Democrats were worried that she would be over-prepared. The wild card was always the question of which Trump would show up — the insult-spewing reality show host or a serious candidate for president of the United States.
Another unknown factor was whether the debate moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, would play a role in calling out Trump on his factual misstatements and outright lies, or whether that would be Clinton’s job.
In the end, it probably didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference. It’s not as if the mainstream media hasn’t done exhaustive fact-checking on Trump in recent weeks. In Sunday’s New York Times, there was a full page in the Weekly Review section with an eight-column headline: “A Week of Whoppers from Trump”.
Trump’s talk radio eruptions only drive his ratings, his unpredictability reinforcing his supporters’ sense of him as authentic. It was Clinton, going in, who had authenticity issues, reinforcing her trust problems with voters.
One advantage Clinton took into the first debate is that she’s accustomed to debating one-on-one, going back to the Democratic primaries against Barack Obama in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016. Trump, for his part, started against 16 opponents for the Republican nomination, and trash-talked most of them off the stage.
Last night was different. He can’t insult his way to the White House.
So there was lots of pressure on both of them last night as they walked onto the stage at Hofstra University in suburban New York. On Monday the polls were deadlocked and way too close to call in the Electoral College of the states. The battleground states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and so on — are also statistical dead heats.
We’ve seen television debates that arguably changed the course of elections. We saw nothing like those moments in last night’s tilt.
So how did they do?
Well, there were no knockout blows on either side. They both survived.
There was no dominant clickbait, no defining soundbite. Numbers? Check with the networks. Best clip? There isn’t one. Who won? CNN poll responders thought Clinton won by a 61-27 margin. But no knockout.
The TV networks were calling the first Clinton-Trump debate the most important since the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in September 1960, 56 years ago. It’s interesting, looking at the tape of that debate (it’s on YouTube), how primitive it looks today — not only in terms of production values but in terms of content.
It was in black and white, with only three cameras in a Chicago studio shooting from behind the heads of a panel of four journalists. The moderator, Howard K. Smith, was sitting behind a little teacher’s desk, and at the end of the debate had to do a shout-out to the floor director asking how much time each candidate had for his closing statement. (The answer was about three minutes.)
Both Kennedy and Nixon spoke of “medical care for the aged”. Medicare wasn’t then in the vocabulary. On education, Kennedy pointed out that “a Negro boy” had only one-third the opportunity of a white kid to graduate from high school and go on to university.
The conventional wisdom of the day, and the legend ever since, was that Kennedy won the first debate, which propelled him to the presidency in an election he won by just over 100,000 votes.
But when you watch the video, it’s clear that Nixon held his own, except for perspiring profusely on camera. The legend has it that he had a “five o’clock shadow”; that’s not apparent on the tape. Voters who saw the debate on television thought Kennedy won, while a majority of those who listened on radio thought Nixon did.
We’ve seen television debates since that arguably changed the course of elections. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won on two soundbites against the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. First, Reagan asked Americans whether they were “better off than (they) were four years ago.” Then, in an exchange over health care, he shot down Carter with his signature quip: “There you go again.”
Here at home, we had the watershed election debate of 1984. “You had an option, sir,” Brian Mulroney thundered at John Turner during an exchange on patronage appointments. Then there was Turner in the 1988 leaders debate, engaging Mulroney on free trade with a single sentence: “I believe you have sold us out.”
Never underestimate the effect of election debates. Remember the 2015 Alberta campaign, when in the leaders’ debate Progressive Conservative Premier Jim Prentice suggested “math was difficult” for NDP leader Rachel Notley. Prentice got an unwelcome lesson in electoral math just two weeks later.
We saw nothing like those moments in last night’s tilt. Six weeks to go — still too close to call.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
