Zack Stanton is digital editor of Politico Magazine and the former editor of the Wilson Quarterly. You can find him on Twitter at @zackstanton.

Before the cameras go live at the presidential debate on Monday night, the mind games have already begun. The telegraphed punches, false tells, attempts to get inside the other candidate’s head.

Every great competitor has his or her trick of choice—an unexpected move to rattle their opponents and throw them off their game.


Mind games are familiar to every sports fan, whether those tricks take the form of haka-dancing rugby players, sleeveless linemen in subzero temperatures, or a menacing stare-down. “I keep my eyes on him,” said Mike Tyson, describing his pre-boxing match ritual. “Then once I see a chink in his armor, boom, one of his eyes may move, and then I know I have him. … He looks at me with his piercing look as if he’s not afraid. But he already made that mistake when he looked down for that one-tenth of a second.”

You might think this doesn’t apply in the ritualized, high-stakes world of national presidential debates. You’d be wrong. In fact, debates have a long and often comical history of psych-outs, with candidates trying to intimidate each other, messing with the furniture, seeding the audience, and even threatening insulting props. When they work—and a lot of them have—they redefine the campaign, rattling your opponent and easing your path to victory. Other times, they backfire spectacularly.

It’s hard to know what Clinton and Trump might try—their sharp differences make the debate a combustible moment, but both are considerably more accomplished and confident public performers than many of the candidates of the past several decades.

Here, seven times candidates decided to play mind games at debates—and how it turned out for them.

1: Intruding into an opponent’s physical space

Attempted by: Al Gore, 2000

Result: Failure

When Al Gore tried it in a rehearsal debate, his advisers cautioned against it. It looked awkward. It could come off as too aggressive. The risk was simply too great.

Gore decided to do it anyway: The vice president, all stocky 6-feet-3-inches of him, was going to attempt to physically intimidate George W. Bush.

It was the last in a series of unforced errors Gore made in the debates of 2000 (the audible sighs, the pronounced eye-rolling while Bush spoke). Roughly 10 minutes into the third and final debate, a town hall-style affair, Gore sloughed off his stool, a scornful look on his face as he sidled up to Bush’s side while the Texas governor spoke.

Bush responded not with surprise or fright, but with a quizzical look and an offhand nod of acknowledgment, turning back to the audience as the crowd laughed and he continued on with his spiel. Gore’s would-be power move had exactly the opposite effect: instead of looking dominant and in charge, he seemed awkward and inauthentic.

2: Keeping your opponent in the shot, unaware

Attempted by: Bill Clinton, 1992

Result: Success

We take it for granted now, but the town hall debate is a relatively recent addition to the menu of presidential debate formats. It made its debut in 1992, its structure reflecting the style of the daytime talk shows that dominated the era’s airwaves: Donahue, Sally and Oprah.

Bill Clinton’s campaign lobbied to get the town hall format included in the 1992 fall debate lineup. Looking back, it’s easy to see why: The format plays well to his strengths, providing an opportunity to underline his natural charisma and easy folksiness.

It also created an opportunity for a very media-savvy campaign. Ahead of the debate, Clinton and his team carefully choreographed the candidate’s movement around the stage, working with producers to understand the camera placement. According to debate historian Alan Schroeder, the Clinton campaign wanted to “keep one or the other of his competitors in the camera shot at all times, a maneuver that circumvented the prohibition on cutaway [shots] of one candidate while another was speaking.”

The result was that whenever Clinton was in the shot while George H.W. Bush or Ross Perot spoke, he made sure to look stoic and thoughtful. Perot and Bush, on the other hand, were often caught unawares in the background of Clinton shots, including this oddly checked-out moment from the incumbent—underscoring the difference with the more telegenic Clinton.

3: Swapping out the debate’s stools

Attempted by: Bill Clinton, 1992

Result: Success

In that same debate, one reason Clinton looked so at-home on stage is because the candidates were actually using the exact same stools that Clinton had rehearsed on. Reportedly, the Clinton campaign switched them onto the set without the permission of the debate’s hosts—and without anyone noticing. Paul Begala, a senior adviser to the campaign, later explained their rationale: “We wanted Gov. Bill Clinton to be completely at ease in his surroundings, right down to his butt.”

It worked. The stools were far too tall for diminutive billionaire Ross Perot, who uncomfortably leaned against his chair for much of the debate. And while the chairs were the right height for George H.W. Bush, the president often looked unsure of how to perch on a bar chair while looking confident and presidential.

4: Holding on to a handshake for too long

Attempted by: George H.W. Bush, 1988

Result: Success

In 1988, at his debates with Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush shook the governor’s hand for an unusually long time. Ever since, it’s been the source of speculation: Was the long handshake an intentional move by Bush, meant to emphasize how much taller he was than Dukakis, or was it just a handshake that we’re reading too much into?

Regardless of whether it was intentional, it certainly showed viewers that there was a substantial height difference between the men (Dukakis is 5-foot-8 and Bush is 6-foot-2, a full six inches taller). On “Saturday Night Live,” Dana Carvey’s Bush was shown shaking the hand of Jon Lovitz’s Dukakis, patting him on the head like a child before Dukakis headed to his lectern, where a mechanical lift hoisted him to a respectable stature. Without the awkwardly long handshake in the real debate, it’s quite possible that their height difference never would have been noticed.

5: The ambush handshake

Attempted by: Ronald Reagan, 1980

Result: Success

For the first 20 years of televised debates, it was not commonplace for the candidates to shake hands with each other—the debates started after the candidates were already onstage at their lecterns.

That changed in 1980—unilaterally. In their lone debate that fall, right before the cameras started broadcasting, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan entered the stage from opposite wings and headed straight to their respective microphones, as was tradition. But while Carter stopped at his lectern, Reagan continued to stride across the stage, surprising Carter by shaking his hand. Reagan seemed in command from that moment forward.

“Carter’s look of surprise suggested that he thought he was about to be knifed,” wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “The handshake was as lethal. How could Carter then cast a smiling hand-shaker as a mad bomber who would destroy Social Security, the environment, and perhaps the world?”

Reagan repeated the gesture at the end of the debate, surprising Carter yet again—this time, televised. It made Reagan look amiable and in charge; Carter looked weak by comparison.

6: The unexpected audience member

Attempted by: John Edwards, 2004

Result: Unclear

In a famous incident on the floor of the U.S. Senate in June 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney told Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, “go f—k yourself,” after the senator had accused Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, of war profiteering.

So when it came time for the vice presidential debates that October, Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) had a plan to get inside Cheney’s head during the debate: He reserved a seat for Leahy in the second row of the debate’s audience, where Cheney would almost certainly see him.

Cheney’s debate performance was characteristically reticent, though it’s unclear what, if any, role Leahy’s seat played in rattling him up. Reportedly, after the debate finished, the Bush-Cheney campaign called the Kerry-Edwards team to complain about the move.

7: The derisive prop

Attempted by: Negotiators for both Dan Quayle & Al Gore, 1992

Result: Détente

Every presidential debate is the topic of high-stakes negotiations by the campaigns involved, which will push for any number of advantages and concessions—from podium height to a chillier on-stage temperature.

In the run-up to the 1992 VP debate, though, Dan Quayle’s staff lobbied for the ability to let each candidate take a single prop on stage. Their plan was to have Quayle bring out Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, and read a passage or two from it during the actual debate to embarrass Gore.

Gore’s strategists agreed to let each candidate have a prop, telling the Quayle team Gore planned to bring a single item on stage: a potato—an unsubtle reminder of a humiliating June 1992 gaffe where Quayle infamously misspelled the word “potato” while attending an elementary-school spelling bee, instructing a 12-year-old who had spelled the word correctly to add an “e” to the end.

Quayle’s campaign speedily dropped their request for props.