An alternate history of the 2024 presidential debate(s)

I realize this is an . . . extremely sensitive topic, but it’s one that genuinely fascinates me at this particular moment so: submitted for your consideration.

The original 2024 presidential debate schedule was radically unusual. How unusual? Between 1960 and 2020 a total of 34 major candidate presidential debates took place. The range of dates on which these debates took place was extremely narrow, to the point where an Ariana Grande fan who looked at that range might very well assume that there was some sort of federal law in place, requiring that all such debates happen between late September and late October. The earliest and latest presidential debates — oddly enough both took place in the same year, 1980 — were September 21 and October 28th, respectively. Presidential debates always happened in October, unless the first debate was at the end of the September. This schedule had been in place for the 60 years the tradition had existed.

One story that remains to be fully told is why the 2024 schedule was such a radical departure from this extremely formalized schedule. How did the respective camps come to agree to a first debate a full three months outside the standardized format, and why?

This question isn’t of merely academic interest, to put it mildly. That agreement, for whatever reasons it was reached, ended up utterly transforming the presidential race, and quite possibly the future of America.

I really don’t want to re-litigate at this moment the question of why and to what extent Joe Biden has declined physically and mentally over the past three and a half years in general, and the last six months in particular (opinions on this blog range from “just a little bit,” to “radically” — for a particularly dire assessment, see this), but whatever decline had happened and is continuing to happen was undeniably having a strong negative effect on his electoral chances. He was consistently behind in the polls in all the swing states, and one possible explanation for the highly unusual debate schedule was that it was a kind of Hail Mary pass on the part of his campaign team, inspired by a hope to fundamentally shake up a race that, given the extreme familiarity of voters with both candidates, seemed stuck in a place that looked quite bad for Biden.

Well the debate certainly shook up the race, and the question I want to throw out to LGM is this: The vast majority of commenters who voiced an opinion on the matter between June 27th and last Sunday afternoon were against Biden withdrawing. If you were in this group, either explicitly or while in lurk mode, would you push the Magic Historical Counterfactual Button and eliminate the June 27th debate altogether? Or are you now of the view that, for whatever reason, things appear to have somehow worked out, if not for the best, then for the better than what it was, over the past 31 very eventful days?

This, I believe, is a counterfactual that a lot of people are going to be thinking and writing about for a long time to come.