Presidential debate reform today

The pages preserved on this site make a single case. The Commission on Presidential Debates, created in 1987 with the joint support of the then-chairs of the Democratic and Republican National Committees, was in practice a vehicle for the two major-party campaigns. Behind each debate sat a memorandum of understanding negotiated between the nominees' lawyers, fixing moderators, formats, podium heights and audience rules; the commission accepted the contract and presented the result as its own. The Citizens' Debate Commission proposed an independent, citizen-centered sponsor, a lower five percent polling bar so that a popular third candidate could take part, and formats with follow-up questions and direct exchange. None of it was adopted in 2004, and the organization did not stage debates in 2008 or later.

The commission's own history page still describes the arrangement the reformers objected to. It records that the body was incorporated in Washington on 19 February 1987 after studies at Georgetown and Harvard, that it is a nonprofit 501(c)(3), and that its mission is to ensure general election debates are held every four years. Its 15 percent polling criterion, first adopted in 2000, remains on the books.

On 20 November 2023 the Commission on Presidential Debates announced a conventional four-event schedule for 2024, all on university campuses, all at 9 p.m. Eastern, each 90 minutes without commercial interruption. Candidates would qualify under the same rules as before: constitutional eligibility, ballot access sufficient to win an Electoral College majority, and an average of at least 15 percent in five national polls chosen by the commission.

The plan was already on thin ice. In April 2022 the Republican National Committee had voted unanimously at its spring meeting in Memphis to require future Republican nominees to appear only in party-sanctioned debates, with chair Ronna McDaniel calling the commission biased. Both campaigns also complained that September and October dates fell after early and mail voting had begun in many states.

On 15 May 2024 the Biden campaign sent the commission a letter saying the president would not debate under its sponsorship. Campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon gave three reasons, as reported at the time: the commission's calendar ran past the start of early voting, its debates had become a spectacle built around a live partisan audience, and it had proved unable to enforce its own rules. The campaign proposed two debates, in June and September, held in television studios with no audience and microphones that could be cut. The Trump campaign accepted the same day. Within hours CNN announced a debate for 27 June and ABC News one for 10 September.

The commission, which had planned every general election debate since 1988, was not consulted. Its first response, carried by the Associated Press, was that it had been established in 1987 specifically to ensure that such debates reliably take place and that it would continue to be ready to execute its plan. Co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf, who had also been RNC chair when the body was founded, told a meeting that there is no way you can force anyone to debate, and in a CBS News interview on 31 May he predicted the network arrangement would founder on details such as staging and commercial breaks. It did not.

The commission regrettably announced on 24 June 2024 that the four campuses were released from their contracts, adding that it stands ready to sponsor 2024 debates should circumstances change. Circumstances did not change.

Three general election debates were held in 2024, each produced by a single network under rules negotiated directly with the campaigns. It was the first presidential cycle since 1988 in which the Commission on Presidential Debates hosted none of them.

The June debate changed the race. Biden's performance was widely judged a failure, and on 21 July 2024 he ended his campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris, who took his place on the ticket and in the September debate. Nielsen counted 67.1 million television viewers for the ABC debate, carried live on 17 networks, up sharply from the roughly 51 million reported for CNN's June event. The CBS vice-presidential debate filled the slot the commission had planned for Lafayette College. A Fox News proposal for a second Harris-Trump debate in September never materialized.

The commission's co-chair was not impressed by the network format. Interviewed by The Hill in late June, Fahrenkopf asked why a host would break twice to run ads, questioned whether a network's own post-debate panel could offer fair analysis, and criticized the removal of the in-person audience.

The change of sponsor did nothing for candidates outside the two major parties. CNN set its own entry test, closely modelled on the commission's: 15 percent in at least four approved national polls and ballot access in states worth 270 electoral votes. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached 15 percent in three polls and, by the Associated Press count published on 20 June, was confirmed on the ballot in six states worth 89 electoral votes. CNN ruled him out. His campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint alleging collusion, which the network called without merit, and he described his exclusion as undemocratic and cowardly. ABC applied an equivalent 15 percent test in September, and no third-party candidate qualified.

That outcome is the mirror image of the Citizens' Debate Commission's 2004 proposal, which would have admitted any candidate on enough ballots to win who reached five percent in national polls or whom a majority of voters wanted to see on stage. In 2024 the threshold did not move; only the name of the gatekeeper did.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has not dissolved. Its board released the 2024 host campuses on 24 June 2024 in a statement signed by co-chairs Antonia Hernandez and Frank Fahrenkopf, and the organization continues to exist as a nonprofit with the same leadership. Fahrenkopf told The Hill in June 2024 that the commission is not going away and that it would be back in 2028. We found no announced 2028 schedule, host sites or sponsorship agreement as of this writing, and no public indication from either national party that it intends to return to commission-run debates.

Commentators split on what should follow. Norman Ornstein, writing for Brookings on 12 June 2024, argued that the commission for all its faults had guaranteed that debates happened at all, that candidates would find it easier to skip them without an institution behind the calendar, and that the body should be reformed rather than abandoned, with expert questioners and moderators empowered to cut microphones. Others concluded that the campaigns' direct deal with the networks had made the commission obsolete unless it rewrote its rules. Neither camp proposed what the reformers of 2004 wanted: a sponsor independent of both the parties and the broadcasters.

Read against this site's archived pages, 2024 settles one argument and leaves the rest open. The Citizens' Debate Commission said in 2004 that the commission's authority was borrowed from the two campaigns and would last only as long as they found it convenient. In 2024 the campaigns withdrew that convenience, and the commission's schedule evaporated within six weeks. On that point the critics were right.

• Delivered: the memorandum-of-understanding model was dragged into daylight. Rules on microphones, audiences, props and timing were published by the host networks before each debate, rather than buried in a campaign contract that the commission declined to release.
• Delivered: the calendar moved earlier. The first debate came in June, before either convention, which the reformers had argued for as a way to reach voters before ballots went out.
• Delivered: the live partisan audience, a fixture the 2004 plan called a distraction, was gone from all three events.
• Not delivered: the candidate pool. Two major-party tickets debated, as in every cycle since 1996, and the 15 percent bar survived the change of sponsor intact.
• Not delivered: an independent sponsor. Control passed from a body founded by the two parties to the campaigns themselves, with commercial networks as hosts. No citizen-based organization had a seat at the table.
• Not delivered: format reform. Follow-up questions and candidate-to-candidate exchange, central to the 2004 plan, were constrained rather than expanded by muted microphones and fixed two-minute answers.

The honest summary is that 2024 proved the diagnosis and ignored the prescription. The old sponsor lost its monopoly, but the two campaigns kept the one thing the reformers most wanted to take from them: the power to decide who stands on the stage and on what terms. Whether any institution fills that gap before 2028 is, at the time of writing, an open question.