Let’s Cancel the Presidential Debates Forever

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images. Article by Alex Shephard.

Like political conventions, they serve the interests of cable news programmers and no one else.

No one, except perhaps the swampiest of DC hacks, is likely to mourn the loss of the Republican or Democratic conventions, both of which have been digitized and locked down due to America’s abysmal failure at containing the coronavirus pandemic. The quadrennial political gatherings are a relic of a bygone era. Today, they’re boring and expensive and are good for little more than giving high-flying donors one more avenue for access. Amid all the hoopla and pageantry, we learn almost nothing new about the candidates or their parties; the rulemaking sessions and platform decisions are largely formalities. Technology and changes in party politics have rendered these gatherings anticlimactic, if not useless. All that’s left now for a pair of host cities is a costly, lobbyist-funded media circus. […]

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