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What’s Wrong with the Presidential Debates – How to Fix Them

The fundamental problem is that there is a pretense of moderator neutrality while at least one side thinks the moderator is biased or incompetent. When there is a presumption of unfairness by the moderator whether caused by bias or incompetence, there is no stability with respect to the rules being observed. The person who feels disadvantaged will attempt to resolve the injustice inflicted on him by responding in self defense whether strictly following the rules or not. The other person will then be doing the same thing.

Chris Wallace was primarily responsible for the problems of the first presidential debate of the 2020 election. His questions were asked from the perspective of the Biden campaign rather than open ended. Chris Wallace often challenged President Trump, but rarely called out Biden for lies or evasions.

One problem is having a supposedly neutral moderator in the first place. It is unlikely both parties will trust a moderator to be neutral. The questions should be posed to the candidates by one another rather than by a moderator. Simply deciding the questions to ask will introduce bias. Also, there should be a timer similar to a chess timer linked to the microphones and cameras to give the two candidates equal time. When a candidate was finished speaking or reached a fixed time limit agreed to (day two or three minutes), he would turn the time over to the other candidate. The timer would be automatically triggered at the time limit. If one candidate ran out of time, then the other candidate would get his remaining time to finish talking and conclude the debate for up to 5 minutes or some other agreed limit.

This would allow the candidates to get equal time, ask relevant questions, and speak without interruption or the other candidate making faces while the other talks.

Eliminating the moderator would allow serious questions to be asked and candidates could be judged for the questions they asked as well as their answers. A moderator just gets in the way in pursuit of his own agenda rather than letting the public get a better understanding of the candidates.

There should also be a check of both candidates for communication devices to ensure neither candidate is cheating.

To keep the candidates honest, the debate commission web site should link to each of the campaign web sites. Those sites would show fact checking done by the campaigns disputing the other candidate and supporting their own candidate.

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