The first of this year's three presidential and one vice-presidential debates will take place a week from Thursday, on Sept. 30, at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., under an agreement announced yesterday by the representatives of the major-party campaigns.
For John Kerry, running behind in most polls, the debates will offer a chance to show exactly who he is and what he stands for. For President Bush, they will offer a chance to win over some of the skeptical voters who still consider him a lightweight, even after almost four years in office. But if they resemble past debates, the impact this year will go well beyond a mere judgment of who won and who lost. The results are usually much more complex, political scientists have come to believe in the quarter-century since 1976, when such debates became a firm fixture on the electoral calendar.
Wendy Rahn, an elections scholar who is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, suggested in an interview that debates have become rituals - rather like conventions and the Labor Day opening of the general-election campaign - that "convince the voters that they are important, that they are wanted and needed.'' Her research, Professor Rahn said, indicates that in recent years they have functioned as glue to hold society together.
In a year in which politicians of both parties believe that turnout could tip the results in pivotal states like Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin, reluctant voters newly convinced of their importance might well be likely to go to the polls in larger numbers. On the other hand, Professor Rahn asserted, increased fragmentation of the television audience with the decline of the networks and the rise of cable channels might diminish the viewership for the debates and thereby change their effect.
Recent studies of the debates four years ago by Prof. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and others indicate that it matters whether a voter actually watches the debates or forms an opinion from reading media commentary devoted to them. Those who watched the first debate, Professor Jamieson said, tended to think Al Gore won, while those who merely read about it reflected the view of many journalists that Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Mr. Gore look hypocritical.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/21/politics/campaign/21debates.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
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