I know: These are primary debates, designed to help an audience mostly of party loyalists choose a favorite from within their own ranks. But the Red America/Blue America topics make it seem as if candidates from different parties can’t possibly care about the same things. Questions that split hairs over ideological purity only promote greater polarization, driving a policy wedge between the parties that makes it harder to unite the country after November.

The first presidential debates of the 2020 campaign are still a month away and already I’m filled with dread. I keep flashing back to the scrums of 2016, hoping that the media panelists won’t make the same mistake again. No, I’m not talking about the undue attention given to a single candidate’s shockers, though avoiding that would also help. I mean the way the panelists ask an entirely different set of questions to the Democratic candidates than to the Republicans, as if our politics weren’t divided enough already.


Let us review. In the 2016 Democratic debate just before the New Hampshire primary, moderated by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the questions to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all focused on who was the more progressive. The candidates were asked about standing up to Wall Street, single-payer health care, police killings of unarmed African-American men, and the contaminated water supply in Flint, Mich. The pre-New Hampshire debate on the Republican side, meanwhile, was dominated by immigration, military readiness, and who would do a better job repealing Obamacare. In both cases the questions — and thus the candidates — were preaching to the converted.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we flipped the script, and asked Republicans probing questions about poverty or the #MeToo movement, and pushed Democrats to talk about God and guns? Or hey, how about asking the candidates what the voters really want to know? Last month reporters at the Des Moines Register fanned out across Iowa, attending 49 candidate events and recording hundreds of questions. They found that three issues heavily dominated: health care, climate change, and education. Favorite topics of the Washington punditry, like the Mueller probe and presidential impeachment, barely registered.


A good first step would be getting the debate organizers off Twitter. Several analyses of social media postings find that they skew to the ideological extremes, while large majorities of regular voters aren’t on Twitter at all. (On the Democratic side, social media posters also tend to be better educated, and whiter, than the party as a whole.)

I’m not optimistic that much of this will change as the 2020 debate season begins. Already last month’s marathon “Town Hall” on CNN, featuring five Democratic candidates back-to-back, plowed predictable ground, with questions about the Green New Deal, voting rights for prisoners, and student debt. The Democratic National Committee also signaled its unwillingness to think outside the box by declaring it would not accept Fox News as a debate cohost. Of course the Green New Deal is a legitimate topic of discussion. And there is reason to be wary of Fox News. But I want the Republican candidates asked about climate change and criminal justice reform, and Republican-leaning voters to hear thoughtful discussion of issues they might otherwise dismiss. Same for the Democrats.


In presidential debates, the questions can be as important as the answers. They shape the story line of the campaign, pushing some issues forward (the e-mails!) and leaving others in the dust. Journalistic groupthink can further skew the discourse, as can asking debate questions designed to provoke a gaffe or “make news.” Meanwhile, the political parties that run the debates want to please their own activists, who increasingly dominate the primaries. Unfortunately, neither the networks hosting the debates nor party leaders have any incentive to produce a discussion all Americans can appreciate. Someone call the League of Women Voters.

Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.