Commentary on the first 2016 presidential debate
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 Date: November 8, 2016 |
Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates |
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This page was current as of the 2016 election.
The columns below were authored by guest columnists. The opinions and views belong to the authors.
How much will Clinton’s opening win count?
September 27, 2016
By Karlyn Bowman
Karlyn Bowman, a widely respected analyst of public opinion, is a senior fellow and research coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
The polls before the debate suggested Americans thought Hillary Clinton would win the first presidential debate of the general election season. The post-debate CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey suggests the public’s prediction was correct.
Presidential debates are serious things, and Americans expect the candidates to prepare for them. Trump appeared to have decided to wing it. Clinton was organized in her responses; he wasn’t. She was calm; he wasn’t. She was cool; he wasn’t. She looked collected; he looked disheveled. She seemed to have thought very carefully about how to get under Trump’s skin and she did so successfully on several occasions last night.
Although Trump made several good points in areas such as trade where polls show that many Americans share his concerns, he was unable to score debate points because his answers were not clear. His positions are close to enough voters to win this presidential race, but he didn't prosecute his case successfully last night when he had many opportunities to do so.
Will the polling needle move? Probably a little in the short term. The last few polls showed that Trump was clearly closing the gap with Clinton. That momentum, if it was that, will probably stop. As of this writing, we don’t know the size of the audience, but the general impression that will be conveyed to millions who didn’t watch or turned into Monday Night Football after the opening minutes of the debate is that she won.
How much does that matter? Most Trump supporters probably don’t think their man did well last night, but they won’t abandon him. Her supporters are no doubt energized by her performance and that may help her. Will her performance bring groups such as millennials who have been lukewarm towards her candidacy to the polls? I doubt it and she needs to do well among the group. Will his performance help him with white college-educated women where she leads? I doubt it.
Pollsters who have looked carefully at post-debate polls from previous presidential elections tell us that a single debate can have an impact on the race, but their overall impression is that the totality of the debates doesn’t really change things much. This campaign isn’t over yet. Stay tuned.
Preparation Trumps Winging It
September 27, 2016
By David Kusnet
David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He is a principal and the senior writer at the Podesta Group, a government relations and public relations firm in Washington, D.C.
Back in August 2015, I wrote that Carly Fiorina had overshadowed her male opponents in the first Republican presidential debate because she had prepared painstakingly, while most of her rivals weren’t yet ready for prime time.
Over the next year, my analysis seemed less than prophetic. Fiorina fell by the wayside, for all her polished performances in the debate, while Donald Trump, who was clearly making it up as he went along, sailed to the nomination.
But last night, we saw a well-prepared candidate out-perform a poorly trained Trump by every traditional standard of successful debating. The thoroughly primed candidate, of course, was Hillary Clinton. And, while the first Clinton-Trump debate was the highest-profile political event in many years, it offers lessons for public speakers at other events.
First, preparation matters, as Trump would say, “hugely.” With more than 30 years in public life, as Trump kept reminding the viewers, Clinton already knows her stuff. But preparation helps even the best-informed speaker explain complexities and make her case.
For such a speaker, preparation doesn’t mean sticking slavishly to a text or memorizing your remarks. Instead, it means having a sense of what you want to say, how your best phrasings will help you make larger points and how to respond to a questioner or a critic.
Second, you can’t just “unleash” your soundbites, as George H. W. Bush said in his first debate with Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump came prepared with talking points that presented him as the candidate of change and tapped into Americans’ anger about jobs shipped overseas and a political class insulated from the consequences of its decisions.
But he recited these lines without a context with what said he had said just before or a compelling conclusion that would have compelled Clinton to respond to him on issues where she is vulnerable. Thus, there were few, if any, memorable moments where Trump outscored Clinton. Still, there will be two more debates, and, if Trump can find a way to lead with his big points and support them with facts and anecdotes, he will be more formidable.
Third, use plain English – “speaking American.” In the only exchange that Trump may have won, Clinton discussed “infrastructure,” while Trump talked about bridges, highways, roads, airports and school and hospital buildings.
Fourth, dominant body-language isn’t enough. Trump prevailed in the primaries largely by presenting himself as the alpha male, with gestures of dominance and dismissive phrases directed at his opponents, such as “little Marco” Rubio and “low-energy” Jeb Bush. He brought the same body-language to last night’s debate. But, this time, it didn’t work.
Instead, Clinton’s preparation trumped her rival’s posturing. And gender isn’t irrelevant to this. Over the years, I have worked with many speakers, and I have never heard a woman say, “I’ll wing it.” Many men think they can improvise an entire speech. But there’s only one Bill Clinton.
Last night, Hillary Clinton was so well-prepared that she even had an answer to criticism of her preparation. “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate,” she said. “And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that’s a good thing.”
Can Trump recalibrate and rebound?
September 27, 2016
By James A. Barnes
Senior Staff Writer
Donald Trump’s face-off with Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University in New York on Monday night was arguably his worst debate performance since the February 25 CNN-Telemundo GOP primary debate showdown at the University of Houston where blows rained down on Trump and his current communications adviser, Jason Miller, said the candidate “lost a lot of votes.”
Trump was staggering, but he got a couple of breaks from his GOP opponents. One of them Trump helped engineer: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed New Yorker the day after the debate, quickly shifting the news coverage from Trump’s flagging performance in Houston to his newfound support—the first instance where one of the defeated GOP White House hopefuls had endorsed a former rival. The other break got came when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was widely seen as having won the Houston encounter, decided to try to pile on Trump with the same kind of insults that were a trademark of the brash billionaire’s campaign. That backfired and diminished Rubio in the process.
Clinton does appear ready to accommodate Trump with her own self-inflicted wound, and Trump has no blockbuster endorsement to pull out of the hat. (Although the Clintons have an uncanny knack for creating their own predicaments.)
Was Trump fatally wounded by his performance on the stage at Hofstra? If the roller coaster nature of this presidential campaign is any guide, probably not. But will his momentum be stalled? That’s more likely to happen. When either one of the two major party contenders have come under intense criticism in the media, their ratings often sag. The press pounded trump after he attempted to retreat from his past “birther” statements at a September 15 campaign event in his new hotel in Washington, D.C. Instead of extinguishing the controversy, Trump inflamed it—and the media coverage—by insisting that Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign had injected the issue into the public dialogue. The coverage was unmerciful and Trump’s momentum briefly stalled before he started to climb back up in the polls, effectively catching Clinton in some of them.
Still, Trump’s team can’t count on political gravity to draw the two major party contenders back to parity. The candidate is going to have to stop ‘stepping in it’ and step up. The most natural for that to happen is the next presidential debate on October 9.
Presidential hopefuls have managed to rebound from bad debate performances. Perhaps the most famous bounce-back came when Ronald Reagan was able to overcome questions about his age in the second debate of the 1984 president campaign after he ignited them by a languid performance in the first. Early in their second and final face-off of the campaign, Reagan was asked how he would hold up under the pressure of an event like the Cuban missile crisis that taxed even a youthful president, John F. Kennedy. Reagan, then 73, replied, “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience." Even the 56-year-old Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, cracked a wide smile at Reagan’s one-liner.
Is Trump capable of such a deft jab? He’s got an entertainer’s timing and has parried attacks before, but there’s also the danger that a candidate can over-correct from a bad debate performance. In the first debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000, Gore came across as condescending for audibly sighing while Bush was answering a question. Gore was roundly criticized for bad debate manners, but in the next debate he was arguably too polite towards Bush, was a much less tenacious debater and came across at times as almost passive.
The trick for Trump will be the strike just the right balance when he next meets Clinton on the debate stage at Washington University in St. Louis. At the very least, he needs to put Clinton on the defensive without being overbearing. He’ll need to come across as credible and avoid pejoratives. That will require some degree of calibration for Trump—not an easy task for someone who relies on his instincts to guide him.
See also
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential debate at Hofstra University (September 26, 2016)
- Clinton earns a win in the first debate
- Party Insiders grade Lester Holt’s debate moderating job
