The practice of presidential debates has become synonymous with the election season, and like many things, has changed over time. Its most recent evolution came when Donald Trump and Joe Biden made history by bypassing the Commission on Presidential Debates, a non-profit organization that had run the debate process for over thirty years, instead opting to negotiate between themselves and with individual TV networks directly, eventually resulting in the debate that took place on June 27 hosted by CNN.
Last Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Trump followed the precedent established by the June debate, notably keeping in place the rule that candidates’ mics be muted while out of turn, and the absence of a live audience, a departure from the traditional format established by the commission.
A familiar sight was the pair of moderators seated facing the candidates, in this case, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC, whose role is to introduce the candidates, ask the questions and evenly distribute talking time. The pair’s actions on Tuesday generated outcry among Trump sympathizers who accuse them of neglecting these duties in favor of aiding Harris.
A USA Today fact-check showed that throughout the debate, Trump misspoke, used hyperbole, and in some cases, outright lied, as many politicians are prone to do. Harris did too, but the response from the moderators was widely disparate.
Take abortion, an issue where both candidates spoke mistruths. At one point, Trump attempted to tie Harris to radical abortion policies by claiming that states such as Virginia allowed for the “execution” of babies after birth, which resulted in him being corrected by Davis. Several minutes later, Harris stated “In his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” alleging Trump’s support of stricter abortion laws. USA Today claimed, “This significantly overstates the nature of the monitoring called for in Project 2025.”
Despite the comments being comparable in their overreach, Trump was chided by the moderators while Harris’ statement garnered no response. This was the tale of the night, in which Trump was fact-checked five times and Harris none.
In the aftermath, Muir and Davis did a poor job of defending the case that they were acting in an unbiased manner. In a post-debate interview with the LA Times, while referencing the June debate between Biden and Trump, Davis said, “People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” but made no mention of either Biden or Harris’ statements. Her statement seems to suggest that she believed she had an obligation to correct Trump in case Harris was unable or unwilling to.
This is less about one pair of moderators’ biases and more about the format of the debates. Though we have not seen a debate moderated by a person particularly friendly to Trump in the 12 years since his arrival on the political scene, it is conceivable that a debate hosted by, say, Sean Hannity, as Trump has suggested, could result in the same type of bias against Harris. The issue is a structural one, in which the moderators, who should be inert factors, are given outsized power to influence the debate for the benefit of one candidate over the other.
The changes of the past year have shown that breaking from tradition is possible and sometimes positive. The new muted-mic format already prevents candidates from speaking out of turn, removing the need for someone to mediate. The only crucial role the moderators perform is presenting the questions, which could just as easily be accomplished by a teleprompter or a text-to-speech program.
While the need for fact-checking is still present, it can be fulfilled through the numerous 3rd-party outlets that release breakdowns shortly after the debate or even offer corrections in real-time. This way, citizens can collect information from multiple sources while feeling confident that the broadcast they are watching is free of bias.
For these reasons, future negotiations should seriously consider a format that removes moderators from the equation. Regardless of party or candidate affiliation, the American people can agree it is in our best interest to hear from the candidates directly during the extremely limited time we see them on the debate stage and not some media personality interested in throwing their hat into the ring.
