REUTERS/Mike Segar
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will take the stage tonight in Atlanta for the first of two presidential debates of the 2024 general election, hosted by CNN. But regardless of which candidate wins the debate, Texas is already the loser.
Texas State University in San Marcos was originally slated to host the candidates on September 16. That would have been the first presidential debate ever held in Texas. Then Biden and Trump decided to cut the Commission on Presidential Debates out of the process, handing control to the networks. This will be the first presidential debate in 40 years not under the control of the commission.
Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan and the editor and co-author of Debating the Donald, said both candidates had incentives for taking control away from the commission and giving it directly to the networks.
| How to watch and listen |
| Thursday night’s debate will air live on TV8, News 88.7 FM and both audio and video streams on HoustonPublicMedia.org. The debate begins at 8 p.m. CT. |
“President Trump and others thought some of the people who served on it were too against him, and he wouldn’t get a fair shake. He didn’t like one of the moderators from the 2020 cycle,” Kall said. “And President Biden didn’t like how the commission handled the COVID situation of both President Trump and his family at the (September 29, 2020) Cleveland debate.”
The Commission on Presidential Debates had originally planned three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate for this year. Following the vice-presidential debate at Lafayette College in Easton, PA on September 25, the remaining two presidential debates under the commission were scheduled for Virginia State University in Petersburg, VA on October 1 and at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on October 9.
Kall said the loss of the debates could cost each of the four schools and their surrounding communities millions of dollars.
“It’s unfortunate for those schools. And it reminds me, I need to cancel some hotel reservations I had for the initial sites where the debates existed,” Kall said. “I remember seeing some data about applications for the universities that hosted the different debates, applications numbers increasing exponentially after it because of the exposure that they received.”
