Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
On Sept. 10, millions of Americans will tune in to watch the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
The operative word is watch. The most important factor is not the dialogue, but how each candidate looks, reacts, and delivers their lines.
If anyone doubts the impact of the visual, they just need to be reminded of the disastrous performance by U.S. President Joe Biden a little over a month ago when the first—and only—presidential debate between him and Trump effectively brought the planned Democratic ticket to an end. As Americans saw the older Biden struggling to walk on stage and finish coherent sentences, the verbal salads and split screen reactions were the beginning of a historic end.
The visual nature of modern presidential debates has been true from the start, with John F. Kennedy’s performance against Richard Nixon in 1960 being the first televised presidential debate. The reality of the debate format, however, really became obvious many years later, on Sept. 23, 1976, when the audio equipment broke down during the back-and-forth between former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter and incumbent President Gerald Ford. The candidates stood on stage, debating paused, for 21 minutes with audiences watching. That moment in debate history affirmed that the camera really is king.
Most people forget that, although Kennedy and Nixon squared off in 1960, televised debates did not resume until 14 years later. Many of the candidates in the years in between didn’t want to participate and could blame the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s equal time provision, which required the networks to include every single nominee on the stage. (The FCC had temporarily suspended the provision in 1960, allowing the event to only feature Kennedy and Nixon.) Incumbent President Lyndon Johnson saw no reason to give Sen. Barry Goldwater more attention in the fall of 1964 given the president’s substantial lead in the polls; and in 1968 and 1972, Nixon had no interest in repeating his experience from 1960.
Things changed in 1976. One year earlier, the FCC announced that it was suspending the equal time provision for debates as long as they were not being sponsored by the candidates themselves and the networks broadcast them in full, thus distinguishing them from regular news stories. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters agreed to sponsor the debates.
Ford believed that he could benefit from debating. Struggling in the polls after a tough primary battle against then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, he was not as well known as his predecessors and had never been elected to national office. (Nixon had nominated then-House Minority Leader Ford as vice president in 1973 when Spiro Agnew resigned, and then Ford took over the presidency in 1974 when Nixon stepped down.) Carter’s team was eager to debate as it believed that its candidate was charismatic and telegenic, capable of recreating JFK’s magic. Carter himself was nervous, as he later recalled: “There was an insecure feeling about being placed, at least for that hour and a half, on an equal basis with the president of the nation.”
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Americans were disillusioned, distrustful, and angry. Almost 70 million people tuned in to the September debate to see what the two candidates had to say. Average viewership for the World Series from 1973 to 1979 was around 36 million people; the first episode of Roots in January 1977 drew 29 million. Making the dialogue more intriguing was the fact that most Americans still didn’t really know what Carter, a true outsider to Washington politics, was all about. He had surprised all the experts in the primaries by defeating some of the biggest veterans in Washington and then doing extremely well against Ford as the fall began.
The September debate took place in the historic Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, a few blocks away from Independence Hall. An audience of about 500 people, with 200 reporters in the mix, sat in the balcony after having been told they could not applaud or even laugh. The orchestra section directly in front of the candidates was empty, other than the Secret Service agents who were close by to protect them.
Eighty-one minutes in, the debate was not as thrilling as the networks had hoped. The candidates went back and forth on domestic policy. Carter’s advisors, hoping he would look like Kennedy, felt deflated as he came off as nervous and wooden.
Then the breakdown occurred. A technical problem with audio equipment—a malfunctioning amplifier—made it impossible for the audience to hear what Carter and Ford were saying. The moderator, Edwin Newman, interrupted Carter, who was warning Americans that there had been a “breakdown in the trust among our people,” to say, “Excuse me, Governor, I regret to have to tell you that we have no sound going out on the air.”
The cameras kept rolling. Having been prepped to avoid doing anything that could become a visual embarrassment for the campaign, the candidates stood silent and still, sometimes shifting from foot to foot. They occasionally took sips of their water, and their gaze veered between looking down at the lectern and straight ahead. Nobody knew when the sound would return.
The situation was as uncomfortable as could be imagined. The New York Times reported at the time: “They both knew the eight cameras were still feeding the four networks a picture. They made no gesture of irritation. There was not even a wrinkle of a frown. They simply stood, quietly, patiently … waiting for American technology to work itself out.”
The two candidates were like “robots,” Carter recalled in 1989. “We were always anticipating that at the next moment it was going to be over, and then we were going to be right back on live television, and when the cameras were able to transmit again, how we were going to look.”
Ford, speaking about the event the same year, said, “I suspect both of us would have liked to sit down and relax while the technicians were fixing the system, but I think both of us were hesitant to make any gesture that might look like we weren’t physically or mentally able to handle a problem like this.”
After 27 minutes, at 11:15 a.m., the crew finally had the machinery up and running. Although the next day’s coverage didn’t give much attention to the awkward break, the moment was more important than it seemed at the time. Since the unscheduled break in the action, one thing has remained clear, something that candidates and their campaigns will never forget: When it comes to televised debates, the cameras are king. While there are limits to how much bad or good moments fundamentally reshape the dynamics of the race—game-changers such as the Biden-Trump debate are rare—the impact that they do have very often comes down to the visuals.
There have been many made-for-television debate moments since 1976 that have had an impact. In 1980, Reagan smiling and chuckling as Carter delivered a long-winded statement attempting to explain how his opponent would cut Medicare, capped it off with, “There you go again.” It cut to the bone. In 1988, the coldness that Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis displayed when explaining why he would not support the death penalty against a hypothetical person where they to rape and murder his wife played into the worst perceptions that voters had of an emotionless politician. In 1992, incumbent President George H.W. Bush glancing down at his watching as a town-hall debate took place reified the perception that he was removed, out-of-touch, and uninterested. In the first presidential debate of 2000, Vice President Al Gore sighed so much as Texas Gov. George W. Bush was speaking that his sounds became the fodder for a legendary SNL sketch that skewered him as arrogant and robotic. When Gore approached Bush during the third debate, the governor turned the tables on his opponent, giving a confused smile and getting back to his answer, making the vice president look just a bit weird. In 2012, Barack Obama’s advisors went into a full tailspin when the lackluster president appeared to be annoyed and dismissive of the fact that he had to be on stage with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. And in 2016, when Trump physically hovered around then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in one of their debates, he conveyed a creepy and intimidating image that captured exactly what his opponents hated and supporters loved.
Trump knows television; he loves the camera. He has always been obsessed with the medium, and he came to prominence on the national stage through appearances on Fox and his hit reality show, The Apprentice. There has been ample reporting that he is micro-focused on the details of the debates, wanting to know how he will be positioned and the camera angles, and treats each one like a full-blown performance. Even when he was escaping an assassin’s bullet, he had the uncanny ability to think of what people were seeing on the screen—and would see when the incident was shared as a clip. The Republican National Convention this year was a full-blown television extravaganza with dramatic lighting, celebrity showboats (such as Hulk Hogan), and dramatically choreographed scenes of Trump, ear bandaged, entering and leaving the arena.
Trump must know that things are not going well for him. Harris is looking good. Her enthusiasm and expressions of joy turned from a potential problem into a source of strength. Trump only has to look at old clips of her in Senate hearings, such as when she grilled then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 about what laws “give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” and refused to desist when he avoided answering, or when she eviscerated Biden in 2019 about his record on school busing and his history working with segregationists, to see Harris’s capacity to skewer her opponents when focused and on message. During the vice presidential debate in 2020, Harris cut Vice President Mike Pence down to size when he interrupted her. “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” Harris said.
In recent weeks, Trump has been desperate to regain media attention. His interview on X with Elon Musk was a disaster, from the long delay as a result of technological problems, to the amateurish quality of the entire interview, to the strange lisp in his voice.
For all her moments of success, though, Harris has also shown weaknesses in the television realm, including her interview as vice president with Lester Holt in 2021 and her problematic performances in other parts of the 2019 primary debates. The vice president will have to navigate through Trump’s attempts to throw her off her game—in front of the cameras that left Carter and Ford frozen on air many decades ago.