EXPLAINING Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Jimmy Carter, The Economist’s issue dated November 8th 1980 singled out a few big factors. These included a mood of economic “misery”, public angst about American hostages held in Iran and the splintering of the Democratic voting coalition between white southerners and northern workers underway since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the riot-torn, race-haunted election of 1968. “This was the election that Watergate postponed”, was the pithy verdict of this newspaper’s Washington bureau, contemplating Mr Carter’s drubbing in 44 states.

But in their first take on the Reagan Revolution, this reporter’s predecessors highlighted one other big thing, too: a television debate in which the Democrat tried and failed to portray his opponent as a “simpleton” and hard-right war-monger, offering what Mr Carter deemed “extremely dangerous” policies. Instead, we noted, Mr Reagan came across as “calm and reasonable, a decisive achievement for him with many undecided voters.” As a “controlled, humourless” Mr Carter offered a welter of statistics, he was undercut by his opponent’s amiable manner (though our report does not include what would later become the best-remembered Reagan line from that debate: “There you go again.”)

Jump to the issue dated October 27th, 1984, and we reported that President Reagan had just pulled off a “relaxed” second debate against his opponent, the former vice-president Walter Mondale, including an “eye-twinkling one-liner” about not exploiting his opponent’s “youth and inexperience”. A good performance in the second debate was “indispensable”, we added, because a first debate had seen the president floundering after being urged by “zealous staffers” to show off a mastery of technical policy details, only to seem overwhelmed, weary and “reduced to frail mortal dimensions.” Sure, the president made mistakes in his second outing, but this did not matter, not least because of a new tactic which, we explained, involved a score of high-ranking presidential insiders fanning out across the press room at the debate site to press their verdict on reporters, namely that the second clash had ended in a draw that was “tantamount to victory for Mr Reagan.” This technique, we reported with some dismay, had even been given a nickname within the Reagan White House: to “spin”.

Readers bracing for the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to be held at Hofstra University on Long Island, may see a pattern emerging, and one that is more alarming for the Democrats than for the Trump camp. For the lessons of the Reagan debates, visible moments after they ended, was that a candidate can mangle facts and botch details and still win if a debate performance conveys a far simpler message: this is someone presidential.

The historical parallels do not end there. One last dive into the archives of The Economist’s Washington offices—if that is not too grand a name for a wall-full of bound copies dating back to 1931—produces the issue dated October 14th 2000, and our report of a TV debate between Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice-President Al Gore. In this debate, the second of two, “both candidates seemed to be fighting not so much against each other as against negative stereotypes of themselves,” we wrote. Mr Bush’s foe was “the idea that he knows nothing”—a charge that he did much to vanquish by sounding as knowledgeable as Mr Gore on foreign policy. Meanwhile Mr Gore had a trickier enemy to fight, namely: “the idea that he is obnoxious”, and specifically that he is a liar or at least “serial exaggerator”. True, we said, some of the achievements that Mr Gore claimed were trifling. But any hint of untruth tended to remind voters about “the scandals of the Clinton administration”.

To be fair, 16 years later, there is a growing body of political science research showing that contemporary press reports tend to overstate the importance of televised debates, which tend to nudge poll ratings by a few percentage points or less. With the benefit of hindsight both Mr Carter and Mr Mondale, for instance, were doomed to defeat before stepping onto a TV stage beside the Great Communicator. But when elections are close, a few points can matter. And some broader lessons clearly apply this week in Long Island.

As the two least popular presidential nominees in the history of modern polling, Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton need to fight not just with each other, but to slay, in single combat, monsters all of their own creation. Among other things, the property tycoon needs to reassure millions of Americans who voted Republican in recent elections, but who worry that he is too ignorant, too divisive and too hot-headed to lead an unhappy country, let alone to be trusted with the nuclear button. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state needs to win over voters who dislike her as a calculating avatar for everything that they resent about politics. Put bluntly, she needs voters to conclude that she is, to borrow a phrase from a 2008 Democratic primary debate with Barack Obama, “likeable enough”.

Partisans on both sides, and this year especially Democrats, complain when candidates are expected to pass tests of unequal difficulty. And to be sure, the 2016 campaign has seen double-standards at work. Just consider the plaudits that Mr Trump earned for turning up in Mexico City in late August and reading a prepared statement next to the Mexican president without making any cracks about rapists or actually inciting violence: a low-bar performance that had Republicans rushing on to the airwaves to call him “statesmanlike”. But at its simplest, the test set by Monday's debate is the same for both: can Americans imagine waking on the morning after election day, feeling happy, comfortable or even safe as they contemplate President Trump or President Clinton in the Oval Office?

The power of television to fire the imagination and peddle exciting fantasies brought Mr Trump to this point. Now, with 100m spectators expected in America alone, television will confront the country with the choice that many voters yearn to avoid. Barring disasters, one of the pair will be president next January. Time to choose.

The Economist’s correspondents in America will live-tweet their analyses of the debate from 9pm New York time (2am London, 9am Hong Kong). Follow our coverage here