You remember when I said socialism and you said "using that word was a prerogative"...you should be sharp enough to remember...but then again you conveniently forgot about your post the I showed you from the 2016 presidential election where you said...the debates are going to matter. With your convenient deflection, now the debates don't, it just depends on the narrative you're pushing at the time.
What was that word salad bitten was saying to Al bore cause he didn't know and neither do youor anyone else for that matter
Originally Posted by bb1961
I have never used the word "prerogative" in my life. So your quote is totally incorrect.
I've explained before but obviously my comments did not sink in.
In 2016 we had 2 candidates whose political viewpoints were fairly unknown to voters. I was interested to hear what both had to say and how they would conduct themselves. Didn't change my vote. Hard to say whether or not it impacted the votes of others in any extreme level.
In 2020, the majority of voters have already decided for whom to vote. In most polls the number of undecideds is very low for so early in the campaign. The debates will be fun to watch but their impact on voters will probably be negligible.
But if you don't believe me as to the importance of presidential debates:
Political science tends to be skeptical of general election debates. The people who are most likely to tune into debates tend to be highly informed and already engaged in politics — and thus already likely to have formed an opinion. This has become especially true in recent years as partisanship has grown stronger.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...imary-debates/
Intense preparation helped Hillary Clinton command the podium in her first debate with Donald Trump in September 2016—the most-watched presidential debate in US history.
In one of the debate’s most memorable moments, Clinton called out Trump for ridiculing a beauty pageant winner. Trump, admittedly less prepared for the debate, struggled to respond. At one point, Clinton, reveling in her success, shimmied with meme-worthy glee.
Every major polling outfit declared Clinton the debate’s victor the next day. But it didn’t make a difference: Trump went on to win the election. That’s because debates have only a negligible effect on voters’ candidate choice, according to new research from Harvard Business School. In fact, 72 percent of voters make up their minds more than two months before the election, often before candidates square off. And those who shift to a different candidate closer to the election don’t do it following TV debates.
"WE FIND THAT DEBATES DON’T HAVE ANY EFFECT ON ANY GROUP OF VOTERS."
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-tv-debates-sway-voters
The scholarly wisdom in general is that single-media events are unlikely to do much. Scholarly consensus is that media effects, if they exist at all, are likely small. Even though the public attaches great importance to debates and millions, 70 million people watch them, it’s not clear that debates actually change anybody’s mind. Right? So maybe debates matter because they’re fun to watch. Maybe debates matter because they’re informative.
But on this basic question, which is “do debates actually affect who people vote for,” there’s very little evidence that debates do just that. And there’s good reason to believe given the mounds of research on small media effects that any single debate in any single post-debate coverage isn’t likely to effect most voters attitudes.
https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-p...luence-voters/