Let’s make it simple: ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis did a great job covering Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Their questions were sharp, their research was on point, their approach was calm, and they even managed to do some real-time fact-checking without seeming overly partisan. In my opinion, Tuesday night’s debate was the best moderated presidential debate of the Trump era.
Frankly, that’s not a particularly high hurdle. With the exception of the Trump-Biden debate in June of this year, where Trump allowed a sleepy Joe Biden to gawk and mumble his way to lame duck status, most of the general election debates Trump has participated in since 2016 have been chaotic affairs. Because Trump is uninterested in the issues, has poor control of his impulses, and is obsessed with appearing dominant, he generally talks over his opponents and ignores agreed-upon debate rules, as if asking the moderators to do something about it.
They generally do very little about it, which works to Trump’s advantage: He can look tough on TV while his opponents appear powerless. When the moderators try to fight back, as former Fox News host Chris Wallace did in a heated debate between Trump and Biden in September 2020, Trump generally succeeds in making it seem like he’s being attacked by the very unfair and biased media. (In fact, Trump and his surrogates are currently saying the same thing — rather weakly — about Tuesday night’s debate.)
But between compliance and combativeness lies the path to effective debate moderation, and I thought Muir and Davis walked that path well on Tuesday night. The moderators’ questions were consistently on point; there was hardly an easy question. When candidates strayed from the original question in their answers, Muir and Davis generally found a way to bring them back to the original question and give them a second chance to answer.
The questions were mostly specificwhat is important. It is easy even for an undisciplined politician like Trump to raise a broad question of What would you do about XYZ? Diversity. It is harder to distract – or at least it is easier for a home viewer to observe the distraction – when the question is rooted specifically in the candidates’ statements or policy positions. Consider the following question Davis asked Harris: “Vice President Harris, during your last presidential campaign you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don’t. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault rifles. Now your campaign says you don’t want that. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you’re taking a harder line. I know you say your values haven’t changed. So why have so many of your policy positions changed?”
That’s an excellent question. But other Trump debates have had good questions and ended up being bad debates. Where Muir and Davis really shined was in their preparation and their demeanor. Early in the debate, an exchange about the economy got a little out of hand when Trump blasted Harris’ economic plan as being as simple as a children’s book: “It’s about four sentences, like Run, point, run.” Rather than urging Trump to maintain decorum and focus on the issues, Muir effectively steered the debate back to the issues: “Mr. President, I want to expand on something you both raised. The Vice President raised your tariffs, you responded to that, and let’s expand on that.” The smooth change of course was because Muir and Davis were prepared for Trump to be thrown off track and remained calm enough to steer the debate back to more factual territory.
Their thorough preparation and calm demeanor were also evident in their judicious and effective use of real-time fact-checking, which they occasionally deployed in response to some of Trump’s more bizarre claims. Live fact-checking in a televised debate is hard to do well. It can come across as a scolding, and sometimes it can seem like the moderators are ganging up on the person – no matter how much he or she deserves the fact-checking. Davis and Muir did neither. They did not try to refute the fact-checks. everyone They did not deny Trump’s lie and never gave the impression of being upset about Trump’s inaccurate claims; rather, they cherry-picked their positions and presented their counterarguments in a neutral, factual tone.
During an exchange about abortion, for example, Trump announced that some states were allowing the killing of children after birth. Davis waited until Trump finished his answer, then said this: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth. Madam Vice President, I want to hear your answer to President Trump.” When Trump later tried to claim that illegal immigrants in Ohio were eating residents’ pets – a typically odd repetition of a baseless right-wing claim that took over the internet this week – Muir responded calmly and immediately: “I just want to clarify here that you mention Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News reached out to the city manager there. He told us there were no credible reports of specific allegations that pets belonging to individuals in the immigrant community were injured or mistreated.” Preparation and conduct. Muir and Davis predicted that Trump would make these claims. They researched to refute them. And then they presented their counterarguments quickly and calmly, without derailing the broader debate.
If there is one fault to be found with Muir and Davis’ moderation, it is that at times it seemed as though they were not allowing Harris to respond to some of Trump’s provocations, while allowing Trump free rein to respond to anything Harris said about him. As I watched the debate, I felt as though Trump kept jumping in and responding without being officially given the floor by the moderators, and at times I didn’t understand why ABC kept allowing him to do that. But ultimately, ABC’s decision to let Trump ramble at times felt reasonable. One of the main points of these debates is to show viewers who these candidates are and what they stand for. Allowing Trump to insist on a few rambling, vicious, generally incoherent counterarguments gave viewers the unmistakable impression that Trump is a vicious, empty bully who only stands for himself. That is a journalistic Service.
