Through reading different articles it is clear to see that
the majority of scholars feel that that Presidential and Vice-Presidential
debates have no real impact in the outcome of the election. Scholars from The New Yorker, Huffington Post and ABC News all agree that the debates come
to late in the year to have a big impact in the election. The New Yorker states that at “this point in the campaign, most
voters have made up their minds about who they will support. They generally
come into the debates wearing their partisan jerseys and cheer for the
candidate they’ve already picked.” The best way to understand why scholars feel
this way is to take a look at how the debates have impacted the election in the
past, which gives a gimps into why the Obama and Romney debates will have no
impact.
ABC News’ article reports that Gallup
Politics says that historically “election
polling trends since the advent of televised presidential debates nearly a
half-century ago reveal few instances in which the debates may have had a
substantive impact on election outcomes." The historical trend is that
polls after a debate are remarkably close to where they started before the
debate was even held. With the exception of 1976, The New Yorker posted this graph from Robert S. Erikson and
Christopher Wlezien’s new book, The Timeline of Presidential Elections,
which uses data from ten elections showing how small the changes are the week
before and after the debates.
Even though history shows voters
that the debates have no real impact in the election, does that mean that the
Obama and Romney debates follow this trend? Both President Obama and Governor
Romney came into the debates well prepped, rehearsed, and skilled, and did not
stray from their talking points (Huffington
Post). With the amount of work candidates put into these debates, their
answers tend to be information voters have already heard and expected each
candidate to say. Even though commentators of debates said they thought one
candidate did better over another, the Huffington
Post reminds voters that once that, “dust settles, the Obama and Romney debates will do little to change the minds of most
voters. They will simply further convince Obama's backers that their guy is the
right choice for the White House. They will do the same for Romney's backer.”
The debates have no real impact on the election but have become a
validation to voters that they have chosen the right candidate. While polls can
show slight fluctuation, history shows us that voters will remain with the same
candidate they agreed with before a debate after the debate is over. John Sides
from Washington Monthly puts the
debates into an interesting perspective when he states that, “what history can tell us is that presidential
debates, while part of how the game is played, are rarely what decide the game
itself."
Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/obama-romney-debates-matter_b_1921616.html
Aren't debates just an opportunity for folks to assert that their candidate won, regardless of what actually happened? :) Seems like by the time October rolls around, people have their minds made up. Given the way we're inundated with political communication, little can be said to help the so-called undecideds. In the words of a great poet, "if you ain't got it by now, you just ain't gettin' it."
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