No debate: The stakes are high in Tuesday’s Trump-Harris matchup

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The mics won’t be hot.

The moderators will try to keep cool.

And any cold sweat from candidates will be because of the stakes, not the static format of the face-off on Tuesday night. After all, the first version in June proved to be a seminal election event, ending President Joe Biden’s bid for a second term and elevating Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrat who will face former President Donald Trump, the GOP standard-bearer for the third straight time.

The event, of course, is the presidential debate. But like much of politics, that title is more rhetorical than reality — at least compared to the construct of how most debates are conducted.

“It’s a debate — in a way,” said David Cram Helwich, a senior lecturer in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Communication Studies. “But it’s one that is focused on persuading people to engage in a particular act — which is turn out and vote for the candidate — as opposed to being aimed at expanding public understanding of particular issues, doing a thorough assessment of the evidence on both sides of the question, testing the research and the reasons that are offered.”

Viewers — and more meaningfully, voters — “get a candidate’s initial opinion about a particular subject, and then get a little bit of response to what it is their opponent said, but really don’t see a lot of depth around those issues,” continued Cram Helwich.

Presidential debate formats, said Kevin Sauter, professor emeritus of communication studies at the University of St. Thomas, “are a stilted idea of what a real debate actually is. In these relatively limited periods of time, when people get a chance to have a question asked of them and then respond, we’re getting just a glimpse of what they’re thinking. And what we end up with over almost all debates is a headline, and I don’t know that there’s any real substantive discussion of the policies that each of them propose.”

Those headlines often emerge from well-rehearsed punchlines that become the shorthand of long campaigns. Shorthand like Ronald Reagan’s exasperated “There you go again” retort to Jimmy Carter’s charges in 1980. Or Reagan’s response four years later, after a shaky first-debate performance in his race against Walter Mondale. Anticipating the inevitable inquiry about his acuity, Reagan, with the timing of the Hollywood actor he had been, said in the second debate that “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The quip quit any notion the Minnesotan would make it a race, and in fact Mondale would only (barely) win his home state. Other examples abound. As do gaffes that amplified a candidate’s perceived vulnerabilities, like Gerald Ford, who amid the Cold War in 1976 proclaimed that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” (prompting the moderator to say: “I’m sorry, what?”). Or George H.W. Bush looking at his watch while Bill Clinton empathized with a voter in 1992. Or his vice president, Al Gore, sighing and eye-rolling in his own 2000 bid.

“Debates can be viewed as an opportunity to alter the trajectory of the race, but I think that many candidates, many campaigns, tend to more heavily emphasize the potential downsides of making a mistake and undermining all their other efforts they’ve made to craft a consistent message, to frame attacks on their opponent,” said Cram Helwich. Most “approach it from a risk-management perspective.”

Which is why there’s usually debate over the debate rules. Including an inverse request from Harris’ campaign to unmute the microphones, unlike June’s Biden-Trump matchup, whose muted mics were pushed by Biden’s camp. That insistence indicated how much they misread the dynamic: Because rather than muzzling Trump, it enforced a discipline on him he couldn’t or wouldn’t impose himself. The result was what many perceived as a more measured (albeit not more truthful) Trump. And most consequentially it exposed the incumbent president.

Other rules remain as well, including two minutes for each candidate to answer questions, two-minute rebuttals, and an additional minute for follow-ups or clarifications.

These tight timelines often result in candidates complaining about the clock. So perhaps a more revealing procedure would be if they were given five full minutes to answer open-ended questions about complex issues (as all issues are at the presidential level).

For instance, if asked their perspective on the roots and ramifications of rising authoritarianism across the world, including in Western democracies and in a Mideast, Eastern European and East Asian axis of authoritarianism anchored in capitals like Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran — and how this all impacts the Global South — how would they respond? With mastery or mush? After all, these are the kind of questions they’ll wrestle with — indeed, as a former president and current vice president, should have already wrestled with.

And the theatrics of the candidates’ combat on stage is diametrically different from how the presidency generally works. For one, aides, unlike opponents, usually aren’t confrontational. In fact, more often the problem is that they don’t challenge the commander-in-chief enough.

And very little is starkly black and white in the White House. Instead, shades of gray greet the commander-in-chief as they begin their morning with the President’s Daily Brief. Learning in the debate about their approach and who they might surround themselves with might be more illuminating.

But for now, there will continue to be more heat than light.

In part because of the nature of the political-media industrial complex. And in part because of human nature itself.

Regarding the ever-evolving nature of media and politics, “there are many, many audiences,” said Cram Helwich. “And those audiences have become increasingly fragmented and siloed with the transformation of the media landscape,” which is increasingly how the debate is digested by those who don’t watch it live.

Regarding human nature, “Do we really understand policy positions from these [rebuttals]? No, I don’t think we do, but we do get a sense of character,” said Sauter. “And I hate to say it, but I think we’re seeing it in part for the entertainment value.”

“The observation that people are socialized to expect a combative confrontation in debates is accurate,” concluded Cram Helwich. “And I think that is in part derived from the dramatic framing that news media sources use to attract attention to their stories. We as humans are conditioned, or socialized, to try to make sense of the world through stories where we have antagonists and protagonists.” That “dramatic narrative structure,” the communications expert added, “gets reflected in media coverage, and so to the extent that people are paying attention to politics, the easily accessible, easily digestible information to which people have access is rooted in these types of dramatic frames.” And that “creates an expectation that that type of dramatic presentation should be reflected in the debates themselves.”

And so, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, they will be.

But on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 — Inauguration Day — the debate, or more accurately deliberations, will get real, and will be really different from Tuesday’s TV version.