CASEY HUBER
Special to The Leader
Tens of millions of people watched the 2020 presidential debates. Why?
What do the presidential debates actually do for anyone? Who is undecided a month before the election?
Turns out, not that many people.
An NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll shows 5 percent of the total potential voter base are undecided.
These people are generally white and between 40 and 60 years old.
Sixty-two percent of them believe America is headed in the wrong direction, and 54 percent disapprove of the job President Donald Trump is doing.
So, we know generally who these people are and what they believe; but again, why do they matter?
The crux of the argument in favor of the presidential debates, as they are now, is that it helps undecided voters finally decide.
The race is fairly close right now.
Biden is definitely in the lead, but some polling sites place him as close as two points ahead.
Some place him as far as 25 points ahead.
Political watchdog site FiveThirtyEight updates the polling numbers in each state daily.
Right now, they have Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at an 89 percent chance of victory.
However, this obviously doesn’t mean 89 percent of the eligible voters will vote for Biden.
It’s a percentage extrapolated from their polling data, margin of error and undecided voters included.
FiveThirtyEight started as a polling aggregation website, and now has expanded into journalism writing as well as polling aggregation.
Given that the race is fairly close, with Biden leading, the undecided vote swings a margin of roughly 5 percent in either direction.
Also, the usual polling margin of error is 4.4 percent, meaning that either Trump or Biden could see a maximum increase or decrease in their voting numbers of 9.4 percent.
An almost 10 percent swing is fairly significant, but not completely out of the ordinary.
In fact, these numbers are consistent with previous elections.
The undecided vote doesn’t really make that big of a difference, as the margin of victory right now is as big as it always has been.
Therefore, the presidential debates aren’t changing anyone’s mind and are tantamount to political theater.
So what should be done instead?
What should be done is holding the debates earlier, and more of them.
Let the primary candidates debate each other across the aisle, so Democrats and Republicans can both see how potential candidates interact with each other on different issues.
The debates should be focused on issues rather than partisan dogma.
This problem is more the fault of the candidates than the moderator, but it still leaves a sour taste in the viewer’s mouth nonetheless.