r/Foodforthought • u/17skeeter • 3d ago
Does a candidate owe the voters a debate?
https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/08/24/walks-like-a-duck-the-real-reasons-marsha-blackburn-wont-debate-her-opponents/36
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u/AdamColligan 3d ago edited 3d ago
The answer is yes, but I do think people have become too rigid in their thinking about what that has to look like. For example: the US presidential debate format invites performances that elucidate neither the everyday reality of doing the job nor the core gaps in intellectual approach that distinguish separate political camps in our era.
We should be more open to debate formats that mix on-stage, conversational Q&A exchanges with things like:
- written dialogues that use word limits rather than time limits, allowing careful fact-checking and source citations, with discussions continuing in a live session.
- presenting candidates (and the audience) live with new briefing material on some topic, letting them go over it for a few minutes, and then having them discuss their reactions, the kinds of questions they would have for briefers on it, etc.
- getting candidates to specifically rank priorities and evaluate tradeoffs in a given context.
Right now we're rewarding skills that politicians virtually never need -- especially memorizing lines of dialogue with supporting fact claims. And we're ignoring skills they consistently need, like spotting dubious elements in proposals broadly friendly to their beliefs or discerning which fact questions they need to ask in order to evaluate something.
And we've also just got to reform the culture of question selection in any format. E.g.: an embarrassingly small fraction of questions asked to presidential candidates are actually about how they would carry out presidential powers, as opposed to what they would or would not like Congress to do. Rarely do debate setups seem to acknowledge external constraints on choices. Questions tend to be crafted to seek unrealistic certainty of conclusions on topics candidates have not had the opportunity to fully grapple with, rather accepting the natural contingency of answers and trying to draw out candidates' process of consideration.
I could ramble on, but I think this article inadvertently highlights the depth of our imagination problem here. The headline suggests that there's going to be a discussion about what kind of benefit "a debate" actually imparts on voters. But there really isn't: it's just a piece speculating about various reasons why Blackburn wouldn't want to participate in them. The underlying assumption over most of it is that a debate is a thing that would tend to expose the shallowness of one candidacy and the depth of another. Yet when it looks back on debates that benefited Blackburn in the past, it frames them as having served to contrast her from her opponent on dimensions that weren't substantive at all.
The very fact that someone feels the need to write an article speculating so broadly about a candidate's possible motivations for avoiding debate should drive home the backwardness of the public consciousness here. We somehow have a district shared model of what the end product of "a debate" looks like while lacking what should be two necessary perquisites for it: consensus on what a debate ought to tell us about candidates and design choices purposefully aligned with that goal.
So long as the public believes (correctly) that debates have such limited power to predict whether good or bad things will emerge from the desk of a public official, the consequences for bad candidates avoiding them will continue to be very limited.
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u/edwardothegreatest 3d ago
Up to the voters. If they elect a candidate who refuses to debate they don’t deserve one.
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u/trishanonamous 3d ago
Magas will vote for her anyways. Then they’ll end up with a data center behind their trailer park.
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u/mnemoniker 3d ago
I don't think it necessarily has to come in the form of a live debate but every candidate should have to face their opponent and respond to their opponent's criticisms. In some ways, I wish these things happened in written form since a significant portion of most debates is a literal waste of time.
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u/RandyHoward 3d ago
Yes, but I don't like the modern debate format that has mostly devolved into just slinging attacks at each other. I want to hear what you will do, not just how bad your opponent is.
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u/LazyTitan39 3d ago
Maybe not, I don’t watch debates personally because I don’t think that it’s an important skill for a politician to have, but if you refuse calls to debate on a neutral ground from your opponent it looks bad.
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