Americana

Why Biden and Trump ditched the Commission on Presidential Debates

THE SCENE

Over a few busy hours on Wednesday morning, the Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to two presidential debates, made a bipartisan debate commission irrelevant, and locked in rules that will likely keep third party candidates offstage.

The breakthrough came after years of hard bargaining, started by Republicans. Two years earlier, the Republican National Committee voted to boycott anything organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Both parties ignored the CPD when it announced its usual suite of three presidential debates, and one vice presidential debate, to be held in the final seven weeks of the election.

Instead, the president and his predecessor will meet at a CNN-hosted debate in Atlanta on June 27, then at an ABC News-hosted debate on Sept. 10 — earlier than any televised general election debates in history, if both candidates stay committed.

DAVID’S VIEW

By now, people should really stop being surprised when a “norm” gets shattered. The strangest reaction to the bipartisan hit job on the CPD was the idea that Joe Biden, who had run on restoring an old, calm order, had just demolished an American tradition.

That tradition started in 1987; it’s younger than “The Legend of Zelda” video game franchise, and enjoyed by fewer people. And it was always controversial. From 1976 through 1984, presidential debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, which still plays that role in thousands of down-ballot races. In 1987, the chairs of the Democratic and Republican National Committees colluded to create an alternative, with a permanent budget and the clout to fight back as campaigns argued over moderators and rules.

Why did the CPD replace the LWV? Because the major parties wanted it that way, and the CPD’s offer was more predictable. When it ran the debates, the League invited candidates to suggest moderators; by 1984, that became a minor debacle, as the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale struck dozens of journalists from the pool. (Barbara Walters opened their first debate by chastising the campaigns “on behalf of my fellow journalists.”) Another factor: The LWV didn’t set rules that kept third party candidates offstage, and the CPD did. In 1980, the LWV angered Democrats by holding a debate between Reagan and independent John Anderson when Jimmy Carter refused to participate; it threatened to leave an empty chair onstage for Carter, but backed down. The CPD created a new standard, requiring all candidates to appear on enough ballots to theoretically win the presidency, and to poll at 15% or higher. Ross Perot pulled that off in 1992, and no third-party candidate ever did again.

When did the major party candidates turn on the CPD? After 2020, when Trump became the first candidate to pull out of a CPD-planned debate after it had been announced. The CPD’s prestige had protected it before that. In 2000, George W. Bush pitched an alternative to the pre-announced CPD schedule: One hosted by the commission, one on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and one on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” That backfired when Al Gore suggested that Bush, then leading him in polls, was trying to shrink the potential audience.

“What’s wrong with the commission debates?” he asked in a CBS News interview. “Is it that so many people are watching?”

Carping about the debate format got more acceptable after 2012, when CNN’s Candy Crowley corrected Mitt Romney when he said that Barack Obama never called the Benghazi attack “an act of terror.” (“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama quipped.) This negated one of the advantages of ditching the LWV for the CPD — the LWV was much more willing to let reporters ask follow-up questions and spar with the candidates. That was the prelude to Trump’s 2020 decision to bail on the second scheduled debate, because he didn’t like one of moderator Steve Scully’s tweets, and a panicking Scully falsely claimed that he’d been hacked.

One more prosaic reason for the collapse: Early voting. That was one of the main reasons for reform noted in a 2015 Annenberg report, with contributions from Bidenworld’s Anita Dunn and Ron Klain, on how to change the format. And it was central to the RNC’s decision to bolt. Before the 2020 debate, the party adopted Trump’s line that Biden might be so old and addled that it was unfair for ballots to be cast before voters got a chance to see him leave his “basement.”

Can third party candidates still make the stage? Yes. CNN carried over the CPD’s polling and threshold rules — 15% in polls, qualified for at least 270 electoral votes. When the debates began in September, every state’s ballot was set already. This time, the ballot qualification cutoff in dozens of states, including Florida (July 15), Pennsylvania (Aug. 1), and Wisconsin (Aug. 6), is well after CNN’s June 20 deadline.

One impact: Robert F. Kennedy won’t know how many ballots he’ll appear on yet. He’s qualified for states worth 85 electoral votes, and his campaign claims to have met signature requirements in states worth another 129 electoral votes. Even Kennedy isn’t entirely sure what to do with that information. On Wednesday morning, he posted on X that “Presidents Trump and Biden are colluding to lock America into a head-to-head match-up that 70% say they do not want.” Hours later, he posted that he was “happy to report” that he’d “meet the criteria to participate.”

THE VIEW FROM MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

House members who talked with Semafor’s Kadia Goba were pretty exhausted by this, too. There was not a lot of nostalgia for the CPD in people’s reactions to their nominees’ decision to negotiate their own pair of debates.

“I’m tired of the debate about the debate,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat who is ten years younger than the CPD.

“I think Trump agreed to him because he knows he’s dealing with Joe Biden and he’s gonna win the debate,” said Texas Rep. Troy Nehls. “And the general election is now June 27. Trump is gonna thump the chump.”

Democrats praised Biden for out-foxing Trump and getting a debate on his own terms with no CPD meddling. “I think the President did a masterful job of setting the standards and the parameters,” said Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar. Asked if Biden was vulnerable because of his verbal slips, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries scoffed: “Donald Trump doesn’t even know the difference between Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.”

New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew had one regret: Trump wanted conservative moderators, and instead he got Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. “I would have liked it to have been co-hosted by Fox and co-hosted by, say, Newsmax,” said Van Drew, who switched to the GOP five years ago when Trump asked him to. “You’re gonna hear tough questions for [Trump] and, to be honest with you, softballs for President Biden. I don’t know if that’s good. So, I hate that he’s gonna have to be, maybe, debating both the moderators and Joe Biden.”

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear she was against Biden accepting the debate challenge — but not the specific terms, just any debate with Trump at all.

“I myself would never recommend going on stage with Donald Trump, but the president has decided that’s what he wants to do,” Pelosi said. “I think the format he is suggesting is a good one.”

NOTABLE

• In Politico, CPD co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf says that the campaigns are making a mistake by ditching, that the Biden team has always wanted to ice out the CPD, and that Trump made an impulsive blunder by agreeing to Biden’s terms so quickly.
• In the Columbia Journalism Review, Cameron Joseph runs through the problems that the candidates might have created by ditching the commission, which was “great for the two major-party nominees and the networks that get exclusives on the debates,” but nobody else.
• And in Semafor, Kadia Goba talks to Virginia Democrats who are frustrated that the HBCU chosen to host a debate might not get one. Back-up plans: Bringing the VP debate or ABC News debate to Virginia State University, or holding some candidate event.

Kadia Goba contributed reporting.

Maryland. Democrats picked Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks as their nominee for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, rejecting Rep. David Trone, who poured his Total Wine fortune into a year’s worth of TV ads, mailers, and canvassers. Trone, who held a small lead for much of the year, couldn’t stop a last-week surge for Alsobrooks, who had Gov. Wes Moore and most of the congressional delegation behind her.

Republicans nominated former Gov. Larry Hogan, the first GOP nominee in 18 years to run competitively with Democrats in polls; as of Friday’s ballot count, 37% of Republican primary voters had cast a protest vote against Hogan, who clashed for years with Donald Trump and never voted for him. Two days after the primary, Hogan told the New York Times, for the first time, that he would vote to codify Roe v. Wade. In the day’s second-pricest contest, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth beat former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn for the nomination in the safely Democratic 3rd Congressional District. AIPAC, which spent heavily in the race, claimed credit for the victory – Dunn entered Tuesday with a 3-1 direct spending advantage.

West Virginia. Gov. Jim Justice easily won the GOP nomination to succeed Sen. Joe Manchin; Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott won the Democratic nomination, beating a progressive activist who’d been widely profiled in like-minded outlets and ran strongest in the coal counties where his party has collapsed in the last 10 years. Rep. Carol Miller, who represents that region, won re-nomination by 26 points over Derrick Evans, who resigned a seat in the state legislature after participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but made that participation central to his comeback bid.

Nebraska. Rep. Don Bacon defeated a conservative primary challenger by 24 points; he’d beaten another underfunded challenger two years ago by 53 points. The easy but closer win came after Bacon voted for a Ukraine funding package opposed by local Republicans, and after both the Douglas County (Omaha) GOP and state GOP chairman endorsed challenger Dan Frei.

Health Equity Now, “Values.” Oregon’s Democratic leadership endorsed state Rep. Janelle Bynum in the Bend-based 5th Congressional District, fearful that 2022 nominee Jamie McLeod-Skinner would lose again. Health Equity Now, a PAC formed this month, showed up this week to promote McLeod-Skinner’s support of Medicare-for-All — “putting progressive values into action.” But both Democrats think this PAC is a Republican ruse. It was placed by a firm that otherwise works with Republicans, and its paperwork was filed by a GOP operative. (Because it was created so recently, Health Equity Now doesn’t have to reveal donor information until after the May 21 primary.)

Mary Draves for Congress, “Results Matter.” No credible Democrat stepped up to challenge Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who raised millions of dollars after House Republicans censured her for endorsing Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea.” But Republicans across Michigan have cut ads attacking Tlaib and Gaza protests in Dearborn, which she now represents. Mary Draves, running for a swing seat that covers Flint and Saginaw, says that “death to America” chants in Dearborn made her state unrecognizable; the city’s mayor condemned the chants, made at a single rally, but they made news for months.

CHC BOLD PAC, “Affordable.” The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s PAC rarely has to defend incumbents in safe Democratic seats. But New Jersey Rep. Rob Menendez has a unique problem: His father’s been indicted for the second time, and Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla is running against the whole family. The PAC’s ad doesn’t mention the scandal or Bhalla, focusing instead on the most popular Democratic issues: Protecting Social Security, capping prescription drug costs.

Voters have been inscrutable this year on a very basic question: What do they want to do, exactly, about their choice of major-party nominees? While a majority of voters say they’re unhappy with the available options, a small share of them support Kennedy or another third party candidate. Before that, while most Democrats said they wanted a Biden alternative, few picked one in the Democratic primary. And while 64% of voters say it’s “extremely” or “very” important for Trump and Biden to debate, that number drops to 43% for Kennedy, with less than a quarter holding strong feelings on the topic.

From his home in Texas at the time, NBC News reporter Mike Hixenbaugh spent years covering a fight over school boards. Southlake, a prosperous and conservative Dallas suburb, confronted high-profile incidents of bullying and racism at its schools with a diversity plan, modeled after what had seemed to work elsewhere. The reaction: A conservative backlash that roped in the state Republican Party, Fox News, and well-funded conservative campaign groups that won control of the school board and rolled everything back. The community became a national face of the post-2020 culture war over “critical race theory” and Hixenbaugh wrote about all of it in “They Came for the Schools,” which was released this week. This is an edited transcript of our conversation about the book.

Americana: One premise of this fight over schools in Southlake seems to be that the community’s harmony was under attack. Was there ever some perfect moment when there was no division in Southlake, and it got ruined by liberals?

Mike Hixenbaugh: No, and one of the things I really wanted to do was to put what’s been happening since 2020 into a longer historical context. Southlake is a proxy for the development of suburbs writ large, and how they were designed for white folks beginning in the 1940s and 50s, during the era of white flight and desegregation. Over the last 20 or 30 years, many of the suburbs have grown more diverse. If you’re a Black kid going to school in Southlake in the 1990s, in the 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon to have classmates make really stupid, racist comments.

Did they see themselves as racists? Probably not. “You’re the smartest Black girl I know” — things like that, what you might now call microaggressions. But after Trump got in office in 2017, there was this wave of one-off stories that you could find in pretty much any metro area in the country. There are suburban school districts where kids have been chanting “build the wall” at their Hispanic classmates, or carving the N-word on a bathroom stall along with Make America Great Again, or recording themselves saying the N-word.

Americana: And how did schools respond?

Hixenbaugh: In suburbs, all over the place, schools were reckoning with this kind of culture that kind of had been there, but was now far more apparent. Southlake and other districts formed committees to address this stuff. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and the widespread protests and the backlash that followed, suddenly conservatives were looking at schools, they were looking at the pandemic restrictions, and they asked: What are all these plans about diversity and inclusion?

Americana: Were the schools in decline when that panic began? In a lot of places, the backlash was powered by falling test scores, or worries about kids falling behind.

Hixenbaugh: No. In Southlake, there was a local panic and outrage over the mask policy. Schools were closed for the spring, like every school in the country in the spring during COVID. But the schools were not in decline. And if you look at the test scores, this is a community that is wealthy by design; they don’t allow apartments or multifamily housing. The families of color that moved in were fairly affluent. There’s not really an achievement gap at Carroll and Southlake.

But some parents got really animated about the mask mandate, and saw what was happening with the protests for racial justice. There was an infamous Black Lives Matter group that led protests in Southlake Town Square — parents connected that with this diversity plan that the school was trying to implement. It ended up reaching a much bigger audience. Texas Scorecard, this news outlet for Republicans funded by some powerful Texas billionaires, got involved and helped to make Southlake the poster child for fighting BLM.

Americana: What was actually in the plan that inspired all of this?

Hixenbaugh: The cultural competence action plan called for mandatory diversity and inclusion training for teachers and students. It called for a review of the curriculum to make sure that students were getting a full reckoning of racism in America’s past. They wanted to increase the diversity of teacher applicants in the school district, and they wanted to hire a director of DEI with a six-figure salary. That wasn’t what the BLM activists wanted, but the right basically conflated those things and said the district’s trying to bow to these Black Lives Matter activists, these woke kids and young adults.

[Conservative commentator] Dana Loesch, who lives in Southlake and is a major figure here, at least addressed the fact that some kids get bullied. Her take is that this is part of life. It’s natural. It’s how we set the pecking order, which, if you ask educators, is not a great response to bullying of any kind. But the parents organizing against this started saying: These harassment stories are fake. It’s not real. It’s not true. My kids have never been bullied. I’ve never seen this.

Americana: What exactly are people worried about happening to the schools and their children if they don’t take over the school board?

Hixenbaugh: I’ll quote Allen West, the former Texas GOP chairman, who was very involved in this. After the CCAP was introduced, he held an event where he warned people: Texas is under assault from people who are moving here from places like New Jersey and California, and want to remake Texas and remake your community. He also said that the school board is the most important elected office in America because they’re coming for your kids. He said it was just like Hitler: He was trying to remake society by indoctrinating children.

So, that’s the fear. If we don’t step forward and take control of the schools at the local, state and federal levels, the left is going to push LGBTQ identities on them, they’re going to convince your kids to change genders, they’re going to teach white kids that America is terrible, and that they should hate themselves. They’re going to teach Black kids that they’re all victims, and that their skin color is the most important thing about them. Now, there are some cringy DEI programs and cringy lessons that have made it into them, but this Hitler strawman is just not substantiated by reality.

Americana: What are the federal stakes here? The Biden administration has intervened in some of these districts, on some of these issues; what could a second Trump administration change?

Hixenbaugh: Every public school in the country gets some percentage of their funding from the federal government. It’s only, like, 2% of the budget in Southlake, but the federal government provides it and has held that funding over districts’ heads via the enforcement of civil rights laws that were passed in the 1960s and 70s. That means guarantees for students of all races and ethnicities, Title IX protections for sex and gender. And there’s been a handful of these cases, like Southlake, where there have been reports of discrimination and bullying and reports that the district failed to adequately address, where conservatives have taken over and basically banned any kind of DEI programs or explicit protections for LGBTQ students.

The federal government has opened investigations into several of these. What the Department of Education has typically done in these cases is go and negotiate with the schools and say, here’s some changes to the student code of conduct or discrimination policy statement to make it acceptable. There’s a whole menu; it’s basically all the stuff that was in the CCAP that local voters rejected. So, what’s at stake in the presidential election is whether the federal government’s still going to be in that business. Donald Trump has said he’d abolish the Education Department and return education policy to the states. Project 2025 has a whole long section on banning critical race theory, making sure that there’s no special protections based on gender or sexual orientation in action, and ending administrative enforcement of civil rights laws by the Education Department. So this thing that’s happening in Southlake right now? “Don’t worry about it, you don’t have to do the things that the Biden administration told you to do.” That’s what’s on the line with education.

• four days until primaries in Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon
• 31 days until the first presidential debate
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• 172 days until the 2024 presidential election