If nothing goes wrong, there will be electoral debates for the November presidential elections in the United States. It is a tradition of decades, but its continuity was up in the air. The current president, Democrat Joe Biden, had been reluctant to debate his Republican rival, Donald Trump, whom he considers a danger to democracy. This Friday, however, Biden showed in a radio interview his willingness to debate.
When the host, Howard Stern, asked Biden if he was willing to debate Trump, the president replied: “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, I am delighted to debate with him.” Until now, the president had said that it would depend on Trump’s behavior whether or not he agreed to participate with him in a debate. On March 8, they asked him if he would commit to a debate with his rival and he answered: “It depends on his behavior.”
Trump, who did not participate in the Republican primary debates, has said he would face Biden, under certain conditions. His Trump campaign managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said this month that “Trump is willing to debate anytime, anywhere, and the time to start these debates is now.”
A total of 12 news organizations issued a joint statement in the middle of this month asking presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump to agree to hold debates during the presidential campaign on November 5.
“General election debates have a rich tradition in our American democracy, having played a vital role in every presidential election of the past 50 years, dating back to 1976,” the news organizations’ statement said. “In each of those elections, tens of millions of people have tuned in to watch the candidates debate side by side, in a competition of ideas for the votes of American citizens,” he added.
Since 1988, the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has sponsored all general election presidential debates. He has already set the dates for three meetings between the White House candidates and one for the vice presidential nominees, but it is still too early to know if they will take place.
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Three proposed debates
According to his proposal, the first presidential debate would take place on Monday, September 16, at Texas State University, in San Marcos (Texas). The second would be on Tuesday, October 1 at Virginia State University, in Petersburg (Virginia) and the third, on Wednesday, October 9 at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City (Utah). Between the first and second debates between the presidential candidates, Kamala Harris’ debate with the person who will accompany Trump for the vice presidency would take place: it would be on Wednesday, September 25 at Lafayette College, in Easton (Pennsylvania). The commission has yet to decide the format and moderators if its celebration is confirmed. All debates would begin at 9:00 p.m. on the East Coast of the United States and would last 90 minutes without commercial interruption.
“It is not too early for candidates hoping to meet the eligibility criteria to publicly express their support for and intention to participate in the Commission debates scheduled for this fall,” the news organizations said in a statement. subscribed by ABC, Associated Press, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, NBCUniversal, NewsNation, Univision, NPR, PBS and USA Today.
“If there is one thing Americans can agree on in this time of polarization, it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high. In this context, there is nothing better than candidates debating among themselves, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation,” they concluded.
The Republican National Committee voted in 2022 to stop participating in the debates of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Those responsible for the campaign maintain that the commission selected in 2020 a “clearly anti-Trump moderator,” then-Fox News host Chris Wallace. The former president also reported a technical problem with his microphone during a debate in 2016 and criticized the decision to cancel a third debate with Biden in 2020 after Trump tested positive for Covid and refused to participate virtually. The Trump campaign also wants the calendar moved up, arguing that many Americans will have already voted on the dates proposed by the commission.
In the 2020 elections, held in the middle of the pandemic, there were two debates. In the first of them, in Cleveland (Ohio), Biden was visibly upset with his opponent in a chaotic debate in which Trump interrupted him 35 times during his speaking turn. The moderator called the president to order up to 13 times and at one point the Democratic candidate said: “Are you going to shut up, man?” The second debate took place in Nashville (Tennessee) and was somewhat less bitter.
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