Robert M. Shrum: Presidential debates can pop or flop

Do the presidential debates matter? Like most things in life and politics, sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Jimmy Carter’s desultory preparation in 1980, combined with Ronald Reagan’s reassuring and masterful performance — “There you go again” — arguably turned a close election into a landslide for Reagan that reshaped American politics for a generation.

Barack Obama‘s uncharacteristic lack of discipline in the lead up to his first encounter with Mitt Romney in 2012 led to an excruciating 90 minutes that drove Democrats into mass hysteria. Obama won the election anyway, though only after a hypersonic Joe Biden dominated Paul Ryan in their vice presidential exchange, and then Romney was shredded on the issue of Benghazi in the second debate — by a tag team of Obama and the debate moderator.

Here are some other examples from history:

1960: Vice President Richard Nixon was running on the slogan “Experience Counts” when he made the mistake of debating John F. Kennedy. JFK used his opening statement — eight minutes long, without a single note — to define the terms of this high-stakes clash, which Nixon then largely accepted. Nixon quibbled like a point-by-point high school debater with Kennedy’s arguments while often repeating them word for word.

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Without the debates, especially the first one, it’s hard to imagine that the youngest president elected in one of the closest contests in history would have reached the White House. (And Kennedy’s triumph wasn’t all about image. The oft-told story is that voters who listened on the radio instead of watching on television believed Nixon prevailed. But this ignores that those voters couldn’t watch: They were concentrated in pre-cable rural areas and the mountain west, which already heavily favored Nixon.)

1976: After an unexpectedly strong performance in his first debate, the once beleaguered Gerald Ford closed a yawning gap with Jimmy Carter to just 2 percentage points. But Ford’s momentum stalled in their second confrontation after he insisted “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Carter won.

1992: The most memorable moment of the debates that year was incumbent George H.W. Bush glancing impatiently at his watch as an earnest questioner in the town hall audience asked him how the recession had affected him personally. The episode was a powerful metaphor for a presidency that appeared tired and out of ideas in a country yearning for change. Did it determine the results -- a victory for Bill Clinton? Not by itself. But it does suggest a guideline: Maybe candidates should take their watch off before mounting the debate stage.

In other cases, assessing the effect of these face-to-face encounters is hard. How much did Donald Trump’s crass antics hurt him in 2016 (when he defeated Hillary Clinton) and 2020 (when he lost to Joe Biden)? That's unclear. Less noticed is how much his emphasis on trade and immigration in the early innings of his first clash with Clinton helped him crumble the Democrats' "Blue Wall" of states on Election Day?

Sometimes, as in 1988, 1996 and 2008, presidential debates don’t bend the campaign arc at all -- unless the likely winner’s performance is the unlikely political equivalent of bellyflopping into an empty swimming pool.

Finally, for me, there’s also a painful irony here. I'm a veteran Democratic political operative who worked on presidential campaigns from George McGovern to John Kerry. You can win all of the now customary three presidential debates and still lose the election. The Gallup Poll showed that's precisely what happened with Kerry’s narrow defeat against George W. Bush in 2004.