Vice President Mike Pence and California Sen. Kamala Harris will face off on Wednesday for the first and only vice presidential debate during the 2020 campaign. But if history is any guide and people continue to vote the top of the ticket, the debate won’t change much.
An analysis published by Gallup in 2012 declared that the median change following vice presidential debates in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2008 was 1 percentage point.
“None of the eight vice presidential debates occurring from 1976 to 2008 appears to have meaningfully altered voter preferences,” analyst Andrew Dugan wrote at the time.
“There is very little evidence that vice presidential debates do much at all to alter the political landscape,” wrote University of Wisconsin professor Thomas Holbrook in his 1996 book, Do Campaigns Matter?
Polling also changed little in 2012 after the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. In the days after the 2016 debate between Pence and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump grew by a few points. But it was also only three days after the debate when the “Access Hollywood tape” was released, showing Trump making extraordinarily lewd comments.
Nevertheless, the advanced age of the two presidential candidates adds a new focus this year: Trump, 74, was recently hospitalized with the coronavirus, and Biden will turn 78 years old in November.
In 2016, a record 84 million people watched Trump and Clinton go head-to-head, making it the most-watched debate in U.S. history, counting millions more than the 1980 debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, which was the previous record-holder.
By contrast, the debate between Pence and Kaine drew 37 million viewers, the smallest audience for a vice presidential debate since 2000.
The only vice presidential debate in the last 44 years to draw a television audience larger than the presidential debate was between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, selected as Sen. John McCain’s running mate, and Biden, with Palin memorably asking, “Hey, can I call you Joe?”
According to a new Harris Poll survey, voters are paying close attention this year to the bottom half of the ticket. Among the sample of 1,976 adults polled between Oct. 1-3, 69% said they will factor Trump and Biden’s vice presidential picks into their Election Day vote.
Voters say they are hoping for substance after last week’s chaotic 90-minute showdown — nearly half say they expect more focus on the issues at stake than they heard from Trump and Biden.
