Trump vs Clinton: first presidential debate of 2016
The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is scheduled to take place on Monday, September 26, 2016. The topics for this debate will be "America's Direction," "Achieving Prosperity," and "Securing America," the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Monday.
And it will be only Clinton and Trump onstage in that first debate. The commission announced Friday that third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have failed to poll high enough to qualify. Johnson was averaging 8.4 percent and Stein 3.2 percent, and the threshold for qualification was set at 15 percent. However, the Commission said they would check the polling averages later to determine who qualifies for debates two and three.
For decades now, these debates have been the marquee events of the general election season. They’re often the only time the two major party nominees come face to face, and they tend to draw between 30 million and 70 million viewers. So there’s a whole lot at stake.
When are the debates?
The debates for all three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate have been set. All will run from 9 to 10:30 pm Eastern, and they’ll take place on the following dates:
Monday, September 26, 2016: First presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, at Hofstra University, moderated by NBC's Nightly News anchor Lester Holt
Tuesday, October 4, 2016: Vice presidential debate in Farmville, Virginia, at Longwood University, moderated by CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano
Sunday, October 9, 2016: Second presidential debate in St. Louis, Missouri, at Washington University, moderated by ABC News’ Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper (this debate will be in a "town meeting" format, in which several questions will be posed by undecided voters in the audience)
Wednesday, October 19, 2016: Third presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the University of Nevada, moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace
That final debate will take place just two weeks and six days before Election Day (Tuesday, November 8).
Do the debates matter?
Political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien have written that according to their research, the debates "clearly do not have major impact to the same degree as party conventions," and they've found that the polls tend to shift by only a few percentage points during the debates season. That could be important in a close race (and this race now looks close!), but a massive change is unlikely.
Now, historically, the debates have sometimes produced big short-term swings in the polls. Mitt Romney, for instance, took the lead over President Obama after what was judged to be a strong first debate in 2012.
Yet often those effects don’t last very long. Sometimes a debate bounce will just fade, or sometimes it will be canceled out by a subsequent debate that helps the other major candidate (as it was for Romney).
And in other years, the person judged to be the "winner" of the debates doesn’t get much of a bounce at all — as in 2004, when polls showed voters thought John Kerry won all three debates but President Bush remained in the lead.
Still, in most of these past debates, the debaters have been relatively ordinary mainstream politicians who are overall well-prepared. Trump could be something very different. Perhaps just by appearing "ordinary," he could win some reluctant voters to his side. Or perhaps voters will view him as utterly unprepared and unpresidential. Check out a fuller rundown of the political science evidence on the impact of presidential debates here.