Las Vegas
In 2008, I watched the first of the presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain in a crowded theater in Portland, Oregon. The audience was loaded for bear when it came to McCain; they jeered and hooted at his every utterance—baristas and web designers mocking a war hero who had endured years of torture for his country. (They liked the people who weren’t captured, apparently.) Meanwhile, the crowd celebrated Obama throughout the debate, cheering and clapping when he spoke. The result: I walked out assuming Obama had won handily in a veritable landslide. The polls, however, were rather split on the matter.
Wednesday night, meanwhile, I had a similar if ideologically opposite experience. I watched the debate in a room full of Nevada Donald Trump supporters, who were extremely vocal in jeering Hillary Clinton and screaming encouragement for the Donald throughout. I avoided external media during the event, and walked out feeling like Trump had performed masterfully. Only later reading the coverage did I realize that the media largely judged the Republican candidate’s performance a disaster.
It’s obvious, of course, that context—and in particular crowd dynamics—affect ones’ impression of an event. There’s a reason that sitcoms employ laugh tracks. That quite clearly affects how we judge political debates. Given the big sort, I’m guessing many Americans watched the debate in settings similar to the one I watched it in. (Though the venue I was in had a mechanical bull, which was probably not universal.) Twitter, the pundit’s favorite form of social media, has a similar effect. Rooms full of Trump fans probably deemed their man the winner, and Clinton fans the opposite. It takes a debate performance truly epic awfulness (Trump’s first debate this year; Obama’s first debate in 2012) to overcome that. That didn’t happen last night.
