() – Does Donald Trump really want his running mate, JD Vance, to have the final say in this fall’s debates? Or does Trump want that opportunity for himself?
That’s one of the questions now on the table after Vice President Kamala Harris challenged Trump on Saturday to a second debate hosted by next month.
The only remaining scheduled debate this presidential election season is the Oct. 1 showdown between vice presidential candidates Vance and Tim Walz.
CBS is hosting the vice presidential debate and allowing other networks to simulcast the meeting, as did in June and ABC did earlier this month. The contrasts between Walz, 60, and Vance, 40, are sure to be fascinating.
But historically, the vice presidential debate has never been the last one in an election cycle; running mates typically appear between debates between the top candidates.
Of course, this year’s election cycle has been unusual for many reasons, including the earlier general election debate between President Joe Biden and Trump, and Harris’s late rise as a candidate.
But it sure would seem anticlimactic to have Walz and Vance leading the final debate of the series.
Several television networks have been competing to host additional presidential debates this fall. Harris’ campaign has signaled it would be interested, but only after the vice presidential debate.
offered to host Harris and Trump on Oct. 23 in Atlanta, the site of the Biden-Trump showdown in June. (Trump said he won that debate and Biden dropped out of the race three weeks later, so returning to the Atlanta studio could prove tempting for him.)
On Saturday afternoon, Harris publicly agreed to participate on October 23 and encouraged Trump to join her.
Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that “Trump should have no problem accepting” since “it is the same format and setup as the debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised ‘s moderators, rules and ratings.”
NBC, the largest television network yet to hold a debate this year, also expressed interest in hosting Harris and Trump. Harris’s advisers may have calculated that Trump would be more willing to accept the event.
But the Trump campaign responded quickly on Saturday by reiterating the Republican’s statement that there would not be another debate, pointing to his social media post last week that said, “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”
At a rally on Saturday afternoon, Trump said that October 23 is “too late” because “voting has already started.”
But as political scientist Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, noted in X, people who vote weeks in advance are mostly “voters who were probably unmovable.” A debate closer to Election Day “could influence the small percentage of undecided voters and also motivate (or demotivate) many on both sides.”
The final presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle was held on October 22.
Still, Trump cares deeply about TV ratings, so one has to wonder whether he will really pass up the opportunity to reach 60 to 80 million viewers once again before Election Day.
The first two presidential debates this year were undeniably valuable to the tens of millions of voters who tuned in.
Americans would benefit from another debate, said in a statement Saturday, because the public would “hear more from these candidates as they make their final decision.”
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