Presidential debates are the preseason games of politics. Unless somebody experiences a season-ending injury, nobody cares about the outcome and nobody changes his mind about the team. But you should still watch the debates.
Today’s politics look a lot like professional sports.
Everybody has a team. Most people cheer for the big-name teams that consistently win championships, like the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Lakers — in this case, the Republican and Democratic parties.
The presidential election is like a season. Each state’s results represent a game. Some games are upsets and some are landslides. The biggest games come at the end of the season, when the candidates approach 270 electoral votes and a few close states decide the presidency.
But if the election is the season, what does that make the primaries and the campaigning?
The primaries are the draft. Teams snag new players and test them in the rotation. The good ones — in this case, the most popular ones — end up on the ballot. The bad ones sit on the bench.
Every team debates between the rookie and the veteran, the newcomer and the incumbent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis looked promising, but he didn’t perform well in the draft combine. President Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to run a second term but he claimed to have a few years left in him.
After the draft and the training camp come the preseason games, in which teams face off in a zero-stakes situation that gives fans an early look at team strategy.
Preseason games don’t predict the regular season. In the 2023-24 NFL season, only one of the four teams in the AFC and NFC championship games had a winning record in the preseason.
Sometimes, preseason games prove disastrous for an athlete. In the National Football League, players sometimes sit out the season after a preseason injury.
That happens in debates, too. Biden performed so poorly in his 2024 debate with Trump that he dropped out of the race altogether. However, this is the exception that proves the rule.
Presidential debates rarely sway voters. According to a 2020 article in the Scientific American magazine by Rachel Nuwer, “televised presidential debates have very little, if any, impact on votes.”
This does not mean presidential debates should go away. More than 67 million people watched the 2024 debate between Trump and Harris, according to CBS News. That’s more than any 2023 sports event except for the Super Bowl.
The benefits presidential debates offer are entertainment and rhetoric experimentation. Voters can feel validated or disappointed in their team’s performance, and the campaign managers figure out which talking points worked and which ones didn’t.
Voters, like fans, also learn what to expect from the rest of the season. If a candidate does not have a clear position on an issue, do not expect that to be a priority. You may even witness the end of somebody’s career on stage.
If anything, networks should embrace the sports side of the debate. Create a box score for debates. Record live stats for the presidential candidates, including their average accuracy, number of gaffes, and total time talking.
Just don’t mistake presidential debates for anything more than spectacle. Republicans will not change their mind about voting for Trump because he said immigrants eat dogs anymore than Democrats will change their mind about voting for Kamala because she said she supports Israel.
Partisan allegiances go deeper than television performances.
Nathan Stanish is a senior studying religion.
