I'm curious what the historical record is of debates swinging an election

[IDemo]

Did the infamous "There you go again" debate turn things around for Raygun or did he already have the advantage at that point?

My impression is that nothing shy of a grand slam would actually affect the vote much one way or the other. It may swing the very few "Independents" who are actually on the fence and not just advertising their centrism to make it look like they're more objective than others.

[berni_mccoy]

1. First debate helps the challenger a bit, even if they don't eventually win

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/first-debate-often-helps-challenger-in-polls/

It does not determine an election, but can give a short term bump to the challenger.

[bluestate10]

10. President Obama was un-motivated last night.

The President let the people that support him 100% down, we expected a fight, we expected him to beat Romney with facts, we expected him to challenge every single lie that came out of Romney's mouth. If what happened last night happens again, we will be looking at losing the Presidential election and Congress, with bitter consequences.

[Proud Public Servant]

2. Almost zero

May have helped in Kennedy-Nixon (if you believe Kennedy actually won that election), but that debate had 70 million viewers -- far, far more than a debate nowadays. Plus it was a novelty, not the barely-tolerable kabuki it is today.

Beyond that, there's been no real impact. Ford was already losing when he committed the Poland gaffe; Reagan was already well ahead when he uttered his famous line; Dukakis was already down when he froze on the rape question. And quote Gail Collins:

You have no faith in the zingers? How can you say that after the way Lloyd Bentsen’s classic "Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy" line turned around the 1988 campaign and thrust Michael Dukakis into the presidency?

Debates don't matter. They just don't.

[yellowcanine]

4. "If you believe Kennedy actually won that election"????? Are you saying he didn't?

If so, such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. And if there were such evidence Nixon would certainly have used it. He didn't and there isn't.

[Proud Public Servant]

5. My own family was personally involved

in stealing the election in Illinois.

Nixon's refusal to contest that election was the one classy act in his miserable life. Plenty of GOP heavyweights pushed him to do so. I don't think we'll ever know one way or another, but certainly the Daley machine was capable of stealing 9000 votes in Illinois, and the Texas Dems hardly had a squeaky-clean record. I think it's a reasonable question, and so do at least some historians.

[yellowcanine]

6. Sorry, family anecdotes are not extraordinary evidence. "Uncle Al" sometimes is a lying BSer.

And what the Daley machine may have been allegedly capable of and actually did are two different things. "Some historians" is a dodge. What historians? And what evidence are they using? Just because some historians may think something means nothing just as the fact that some scientists may not believe in anthropogenic global warming is not noteworthy. Question is, what evidence do they have? What primary sources can they assemble to support their argument? "Some historians" and "some scientists" are appeals to authority, which is recognized as a logical fallacy. If said historians are not experts in researching election fraud and/or cannot cite solid data, then the claim is without merit.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html

On edit: And note, the "Nixon did the noble thing and didn't contest the election." is itself a dubious claim. Slate did a good article on this whole topic in 2000. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2000/10/was_nixon_robbed.html

[Proud Public Servant]

7. From the article you cited

The GOP's failure to prove fraud doesn't mean, of course, that the election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable.

And that's all I'm saying. The legitimacy of the 1960 election is open to debate, hinging as it did on victories presided over by two of the most corrupt political organizations in the country. That's why I said "if."

[yellowcanine]

8. Disproving a negative always difficult.....

But the point is, Nixon promoted a self serving narrative (He was the one urging no contest for patriotic reasons when it was really Ike who did so) and Republicans, rather than rolling over, were actually quite aggressive in pursuing recounts, while maintaining the fiction that Nixon was staying above the fray. And the other point is, the recount strategy turned up nothing meaningful in terms of fraud. So yeah, there could have been fraud but there is little evidence of it. So attempting to make Nixon and the Republican operatives into some kind of patriots for not contesting the election is not valid. They contested as much as they could and turned up nothing significant.

[Indpndnt]

3. Dumbya lost them all.

Didn't make any difference.

[JackRiddler]

9. Vastly exaggerated, that's for sure.

Like the significance of the Super Bowl.

[treestar]

11. It wouldn't be comparable though

So many differences from the Nixon JFK debate, when it was a new thing and TV presence started to matter, to the 24/7 videos of today. I would say today they can't have much effect. There's so much information out there and so many spinners of it out there, that nobody can control the narrative.