OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ) – America will be watching as President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are set to square off in their first debate on Tuesday night.
“The debate is 90 minutes, uninterrupted, and the moderator is one person, Chris Wallace. There will be six topics, which Wallace has chosen, and 15 minutes on each one. And Chris Wallace is a tough but fair questioner,” said UW-Oshkosh Political Science Professor, Dr. David Siemers. “There won’t, I hope, be a lot of delaying tactics or going off on tangents. That they’ll actually debate the issues and their positions, and of course, I guess, their temperament as well.”
Wallace selected topics including: Trump’s and Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in U.S. cities, and the integrity of the election. There are a lot of things people will be looking to hear as the top presidential candidates take the stage to duke out those major issues in Cleveland, Ohio.
“There are probably stock lines that both candidates are practicing…It’s likely that both of them will try to land some major punches so that you can capture them in a sound bite,” Siemers predicted. “You know some of the memorable lines or questions from previous presidential debates, I suppose. ‘Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?’ – Ronald Reagan in 1980. Right? Something like that.”
Siemers is interested in seeing how each candidate handles the heat.
“Donald Trump, in particular, is a fighter by nature. So it’ll be interesting to see how Joe Biden reacts to that,” Siemers said. “If he tries to be the ‘reasonable one in the room’ versus someone who’s hurling epithets and can be potentially more of a brawler.”
However, Siemers pointed out that no matter what is actually said or why, both sides will do their due diligence to present their candidate as victorious in the following days.
“It’s not just the debate that matters, right? It’s what people say about the debate,” Siemers explained. “The Republican Party, the Democratic Party, can actually set a kind of reality in place by their spin afterwards.”
That’s why he encourages people from all ranges of the political spectrum to sit down with an open mind and actually pay attention to what the candidates say, why they say it, how it’s said, and truly try to understand both sides of the coin.
“Sit down with themselves or their family, watch the thing, make their own judgments, and not necessarily listen to what the two parties have to say afterward because they’re obviously in their own corners,” Siemers said. “For those who haven’t made up their mind yet, it’s a good way to see what the positions of the people are and how they talk about what they’ll do, rather than having commercials.”
Commercials, Siemers added, are quite often unfair criticisms and attacks on opposing candidates – or candidates that certain interest groups feel would infringe on their stances. However, those aggressive ads and campaign efforts aren’t usually aimed at people who support either party or even really know what’s going on.
“Campaigns generally aren’t pitched at highly sophisticated voters. They’re pitched at people who are unaware of which party stands for what,” Siemers said. “It’s our job as citizens to do the best that we can to figure that out and then have our say at the ballot box.”
No third-party candidate will enter the conversation, as the debate is organized by the two major parties and requires any third-party to be polling at 15-percent nationally in order to be included. Popular Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen currently holds about 5-percent in the polls.
The debate will run from 8-9:30 p.m. Tuesday evening at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic.
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