This Election Is Over … For Now.
If you want to know how bad the debate went for Donald Trump, read what his supporters told Tim Miller. I am very comfortable saying Harris won the debate and won it convincingly. I am also certain it will have the same impact as other major debates we remember from history: Kennedy-Nixon 1960, Carter-Ford 1976, and Trump-Clinton 2016, among others.
Here’s the thing, though: those debates had far less impact then conventional wisdom tells us they had.
I’ll get right to the big one: 1960. Everyone knows that Richard Nixon was in the lead before the first televised debate. Everyone knows that Kennedy’s debate performance moved him into the lead and on to victory. Cue my favorite Canadian columnist Paul Wells, with Rule #2: “If everyone in Ottawa knows something, it isn’t true.”
Gallup Polling was the dominant – and arguably, the only – polling firm before the 1980s. Their tracking of the 1960 race shows the last pre-debate poll as Nixon 47, Kennedy 46. Afterwards, it was Kennedy 49, Nixon 46. In other words, neither candidate actually moved outside the margin of error in the poll. Kennedy eventually built a four-point lead in mid-October, but Nixon cut it in half and made it a statistical tie again in the last week of the campaign. Post-debate polling showed “movement” that we now understand as white noise. In the end, the election was no less of a coin-flip after the debate than it was before it.
By contrast, the second debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter actually saw some genuine movement. Prior to that debate, Gerald Ford had clawed himself back from a thirty-three point deficit to a statistical tie. But his garbled attempt to insist that Polish nationalism was resisting Soviet occupation knocked him back four points, a clear sign of loss of support. The campaign still had about a month to go, however, and Ford once more managed to get himself effectively even (in fact, Gallup’s last poll actually had him “ahead” by one point, or as I would put it, “On the right side of a statistical tie”). Ford lost the popular vote by 2 percent in 1976 – the exact deficit he held before the Poland gaffe.
Much and more has been said about the 2016 campaign. I literally went through five candidates that year, the last being Clinton. However, that came after the first debate in which she so thoroughly embarrassed him.
By 2016, Gallup was out of the “horserace” polling, but the 538 folks had put together a poll aggregator; the data is still there. Between the date of the debate (9/26/2016) and the Access Hollywood bruhaha (10/7/2016), Clinton moved up 2.4 points and Trump moved down 1.4 points. Both shifts were inside the margin of error.
In point of fact, only one general election debate has ever correlated with a major movement in presidential polling: the lone Reagan-Carter debate of 1980. Gallup showed Reagan gained a full eight points in their final poll, well outside the margin of error. As we now know, he kept that momentum going through Election Day itself, winning the largest electoral college landslide since FDR (only to beat his own record four years later).
What can we take from this? Mainly that debates have had far less impact on campaigns than pundits remember. This election still has eight weeks left to it. For many last night, it probably felt like the election was (or should be) over. Well, even if the election is over today, it won’t be tomorrow.
