President Trump’s campaign manager called for more and earlier debates with Democratic challenger Joe Biden, arguing that early voting will lead voters in some states to cast their ballots before the first debate takes place.
“We want more debates,” said Bill Stepien, Trump’s newly promoted campaign chief, in a Fox & Friends interview on Monday. “We want debates starting sooner.” It was Stepien’s first interview since taking the job.
Sixteen states will have started voting by the time of the first debate on Sept. 29, Stepien said. “That’s a concern to me.”
“We are already seeing the liberal Left, the liberal media, trying to create trapdoors for Joe Biden to escape his commitment and his obligation to debate Donald Trump on a debate stage in front of the American people,” he added. “We want more debates.”
In an op-ed last week, Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, advised Biden not to debate Trump at all. “Whatever you do, don’t debate Trump,” Lockhart wrote on CNN, calling it “a fool’s errand.”
Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said earlier this year that more debates were needed because of how little voters had seen likely Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden during the campaign. “There will be debates, hopefully many of them, more of them than usual, because we haven’t had a normal election season so far,” she told Fox News in May.
The Biden campaign rebuffed these calls, including in a June letter in which it committed to the planned televised debate schedule for September and October and called the Trump campaign’s efforts to increase the number “an effort to dodge fair, even-handed debates.”
Stepien said on Monday that the campaign would continue the “push” for more televised encounters so voters could “see their options right in front of them” before they cast their ballot.
“Listen, we are going to keep applying pressure to the Biden campaign,” he said. “We take our cues from the American people. The American people in those 16 states that are going to be voting before Sept. 29, they are the ones who want to see candidates on the debate stage.”
Some voters “expect, want, and deserve, a chance to see their options right in front of them on the debate stage, and we join them in that push,” he added.
Stepien said the Trump campaign would also resume broadcast advertising on Monday in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Arizona, key states that are among the earliest to allow voters to cast their ballot.
“The countdown clock may show 91 days left in the race, but in reality, the election starts a lot sooner than that,” he said in a statement. “In many states, more than half of voters will cast their votes well before Election Day, and we have adjusted our strategy to reflect that.”
There have been three debates between major party candidates in each presidential election cycle since 2000.
The first was scheduled to take place Sept. 29 at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana before the school pulled out due to coronavirus concerns. An Oct. 15 debate at the University of Michigan will now be held at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The third debate is set to take place on Oct. 22 at Belmont University in Nashville.
