What voters might learn from final Hagan-Tillis debates

by Renee Schoof and Jim Morrill, News and Observer, October 4, 2014.

When Ralph McMillan, a lawyer and a Republican in Charlotte, watched the first debate between U.S. Senate candidates Thom Tillis and Kay Hagan on Sept. 3, he already knew he was voting for Tillis.

So why watch?

“I wanted to see if Hagan did something that would make people change their minds,” McMillan said. “Most debates are inconclusive.”

With the final two debates coming up this week between the Republican state House Speaker Tillis and the Democratic incumbent Hagan, it’s worth asking the question: Do debates matter?

The answer is, well, debatable.

If the first encounter between Hagan and Tillis is any guide, the audience will be relatively small for the hourlong debates airing Tuesday and Thursday. Even so, proponents of debates say they are a way for voters to hear from the candidates themselves, an important point in a race that has been flooded with advertising (64,300 spots costing $34.2 million, according to the Center for Public Integrity).

And debates give campaigns a chance to generate news and social media attention, just ahead of the last day to register to vote (Friday) and early voting, which starts Oct. 23.

Louis Duke, a senior at Campbell University and president of College Democrats of North Carolina, said debates provide a unique chance to see candidates side by side, unfiltered, taking stands on the issues.

“I’ve actually been really excited to see the reaction on our campuses,” Duke said. Students are holding debate-watching parties and talking about what they hear, in person and on Twitter, he said.

Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston who has written books about televised presidential debates, said debates can make a difference in close Senate races like North Carolina’s. Many voters aren’t paying a lot of attention to the campaigns until close to Election Day, he said.

“Even though ads have been running for months, people tend to tune all that out,” Schroeder said. “The debate is the condensed version of the campaign overall, and in that sense, I think it matters a lot.”

Debates also have an afterlife. Reporters and bloggers write about them, and parts of debates end up on YouTube and in tweets.

Susan Roberts, an associate professor of political science at Davidson College, said Senate debates aren’t likely to draw a lot of undecided voters.

“The politicos, the hard-core partisans are going to watch, but not the general public to a large extent,” Roberts said.

Their first meeting on Sept. 3 was carried by more than 30 TV and radio stations and had an audience of more than 300,000 households. North Carolina has 6.6 million registered voters.

The candidates don’t have time to give a lot of explanation when they answer each question, and so debates may not convey a lot of information to those who haven’t been following the campaigns, Roberts said.

“But it’s just like anything else – you want to see: How did they perform? How did they handle the question? That may be as persuasive to a voter as how they answer the question,” Roberts said.

There’s always speculation before a debate about whether something will happen to make it a game-changer. Every student of political history knows about the sweaty, pale Richard Nixon vs. the calm, tanned John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential debate, or more recently the impatient George H.W. Bush in 1992 and the sighing Al Gore in 2000.

North Carolina has no such history.

Tom Eamon, who teaches political science at East Carolina University, said that among the many debates in the state’s history, there hasn’t really been one that turned the outcome of a race.

“They more or less solidified people’s thinking,” said Eamon, author of a new history of North Carolina politics, “The Making of a Southern Democracy.”

But if there’s a big blunder, even though the audience for the debate might be small, “it’s something that will hit the media, and people will be talking a lot about it,” Eamon said.

“There’s always the potential for a debate to be influential. But it’s normally something negative that will have impact,” Eamon said.

Still, he said, debates are a great American tradition. “And even if we don’t have that big an audience, and the typical one below the presidential level doesn’t have that much impact, it’s certainly a very good thing for democracy,” Eamon said.