What To Expect From The 2024 Presidential Debates

The 2024 presidential campaign provided its first genuine surprise recently, when the two presumptive major party nominees agreed to debate each other twice – once in June, once in September.

The debates will occur outside the now-irrelevant debate commission, and be held in TV studios (with CNN airing the June 27 show).

A June presidential debate is a brand new thing for the TV-age. What's brought it about? Any number of reasons, not the least of which is that by the time the commission debates begin in the fall, absentee voting will already be well underway in many states. That makes whatever might have happened at those debates irrelevant for hundreds of thousands of voters (who, to be fair, won't have their minds changed by a late spring/early summer debate, either).

But what can we expect from this first meeting of the two big ticket candidates since the 2020 debates?  Who knows? But Sen. Mitt Romney put the best spin on what might happen we're likely to see:

“It'll be entertaining, informative,” the Utah Republican said Wednesday of the debates between Biden and Trump, according to multiple reports.

“Like the two old guys on ‘The Muppets,'” Romney said.

Romney's office confirmed to ITK that the 77-year-old lawmaker was referring to the twosome of Statler and Waldorf.

Ah, Stalter and Waldorf. The Biden-Trump debates can only hope to be as entertaining and pointed as those two were during the “Muppet Show's” heyday.

But aside from the entertainment value, at least one group of people not (formally) affiliated with either campaign is eager for the debates to happen. That would be the media. As Politico's Jack Shafer writes:

Unless Trump changes his act or Biden takes a meal-sized dose of Adderall, don't expect the CNN or ABC debates to move the election either way. But we should be happy for our friends in the press and their loyal readers for the improvement it will bring to their copy. As with Detroit cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when a few changes in sheet metal could create the illusion that a new model has been designed, a couple of summer clashes between Trump and Biden is just what political pros and hobbyists crave.

And there we get to who the real audience is for these debates. Not voters – particularly not in June, when most people have much better things to do than watch two very well-known people trade barbs on basic cable.

It's for the political junkies who have been starved for fresh, exciting, or even mildly different copy in the long weeks since the tepid presidential primaries faded to nothingness.

Now, at last, we get to watch for the fatal flub, devastating gaffe, weird body language, or other sideshow items that make debates vaguely memorable for a handful of people.

And that sugar high will last through about mid-July. Then, the doldrums return. But just in time, the party conventions arrive. And then another debate right as campaign season gets into full swing! The press and the hobbyists are saved. 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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