Dear Progressive Reader,

Presidential debates in the modern United States have become largely performative events. For the most part, candidates do not answer questions, but rather repeat pre-rehearsed statements with the intent of gaining points with their respective base of supporters, and perhaps gaining points with undecided viewers. In that way, last Tuesday’s debate was not much different. But at the same time, debates in this accelerated 2024 campaign season may well have made more difference in the outcome of the election that any others since the very first televised debates in 1960 between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

The four televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon took place over the four weeks between September 26 and October 21, 1960. Three of those four remain at the top of the Nielsen ratings list of the most viewed in history, garnering viewership from up to 61 percent of all U.S. households. The first debate claimed as many as 65 million television viewers (at a time when the U.S. population was 179 million) as compared with 67 million this past week, at a time when the nation’s population is nearly double 1960’s level (although that number does not include Internet viewership and countless replays on social media). Nixon’s performance in those debates is widely credited with his loss in the race—he simply did not know how to use the medium of television (or the subtleties of the use of make-up).

There have certainly been memorable moments in both vice-presidential and presidential debates of recent years—Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s 1988 rebuke of Senator Dan Quayle: “You’re no Jack Kennedy,” Vice President Mike Pence’s 2020 two-minute encounter with a house fly, Donald Trump’s menacing circling around former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Senator Joe Biden’s “Will you shut up man” response to Trump in 2020—but perhaps the most significant moment in debate history was President Joe Biden’s poor performance in June 2024. Within weeks Biden would step aside, opening the race to a new and dramatically time-compressed campaign by Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.

Harris’s performance this past week has won resounding praise and prompted Trump to announce there would be no additional debates. Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post had perhaps the best response when he told PBS News Hour on Friday night, “I would like another debate between the two of them so we can talk about [policy issues and their proposals]. But that ain't ever going to happen.”

This week on our website, young first-time voter Sriya Tallapragada writes about her conversations with other young voters. “The conversations I had [at a gathering called America in One Room] about Project 2025 are evidence that young voters are starting to look past political theater and to critically analyze the platforms that politicians are running on. After all, these policies will affect the future of our democracy—and we should be talking about it,” she says. Plus, Jeff Abbott reports on the first-ever Panamerican Congress, bringing together lawmakers from North, Central, and South America, and Mike Ervin expresses concern and outrage over the reemergence of preventable polio in our lifetime. Also, physician Lisa Doggett pens an op-ed on the fact that “we can’t fix health care if we’re not talking about it,” and John Raphling of Human Rights Watch opines that destroying encampments is not the way to solve the crisis of homelessness.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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