The Serious Consequences of Tonight’s Debate

Posted on October 16, 2012 at 7:15 am by Bob Cesca

My Tuesday column outlines the stakes in tonight’s debate…

With the exception of a peculiar USA Today/Gallup poll, and as I’ve been predicting for the last week, the Romney bounce from the first debate has ended and is currently retreating (see Nate Silver’s current forecast charts). Historical precedent has illustrated how this happens most of the time (the first 1992 debate is the sole exception), and so it’s come as no surprise that it’s happening again. Whenever a challenger bests an incumbent in the first debate, there’s a bounce and then a dissipation of the bounce, and the incumbent generally wins.

Suffice to say, and with an appropriate degree of melodrama, the future Obama presidency isn’t the only thing that hinges on what happens tonight. The president could either fuel Romney’s descent while augmenting his own fortunes, or he could re-ignite Romney’s prior momentum. If the latter happens, it could be very difficult to avoid either a (tragic) victory for Romney or a very, very long election night.

More importantly, if the president loses the second debate as badly as the first and, subsequently, isn’t able to recover enough ground to win the election, it will be seen as a major loss for Keynesian economic policy, not to mention government intervention in health care, Wall Street regulation, student loans, climate, energy and so much more… [continued]


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  • Not Sayin

    There’s a ton of pressure. I hope you’re right about the bounce Mitt earned by lying through his teeth is over. The people I speak to on a daily basis are having kittens about the article in DailyKos today that shows Mitt polling with a large lead over Obama. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/16/1144982/-Daily-Kos-SEIU-State-of-the-Nation-poll-Romney-s-best-numbers-of-the-week. That doesn’t concern me as much as my guy over at another site who’s rarely wrong now has the EV count at 277 Obama, 22 Ties and 239 Romney. Obama was up over 300 last week.

    • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

      Calm down. Willard’s graph line is finally headed downward again, and if we work at it, it’ll keep going down.

      Also, I have complete faith that the president will win the debate tonight, along with the next one. He, of all people, understands what’s at stake.

      My biggest concern is the money from the right now pouring into swing states .

      Adding…..the Gallup Poll released today is an outlier.

      • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole
      • Not Sayin

        I’m calm. I am stunned that we have reached this particular moment in history, but I’m calm. I’m very happy about the early voting results so far.

      • Not Sayin

        I believe there’s a large number of voters who assumed it would be a cake walk to get that bad black man out of the oval office. And regardless of how egregious the (white) opponent’s lies have been, they only see the race portion of it. They can’t hear a word that Romney is saying because they’re too blinded by his badly-tanned whiteness. But if they can’t hear what Mitt Romney is saying, then the President’s words count that much more and this debate matters that much more, because those people will have no choice but to acknowledge that the white guy who lies a lot doesn’t necessarily get the prize.

  • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

    Bob, isn’t there a degree of danger to putting too much emphasis on this debate? I mean, if we make it out to be crucial and he does badly, then the result is magnified. But if it’s just another debate and he does badly, it’s not a big deal. History has proven time and again, none of the debates since Kennedy v Nixon, have had any real effect. Is it possible that this one would? I haz a confuzed.

    • muselet

      Ed Kilgore quotes Alec MacGillis telling readers to stop obsessing about presidential debates:

      As you may have heard, the stakes for tonight’s debate are huge. Huge! How big are they? So big that one must resort to a child’s figure of speech: bigger than everything in the whole wide world.

      There’s more, dripping with (appropriate) sarcasm. Tonight’s debate is a big deal because it’s been declared to be a big deal (mostly by our glorious news media).

      Unfortunately, the debates are also likely to persuade weak-minded voters. As I’ve said before, people like to back winners and if there’s a declared “clear winner” in this debate, expect the polls to shift in that direction. That’s the real effect tonight could have.

      –alopecia

      • Brutlyhonest

        In the run-up to the first debate, the corporate media kept hammering away that the debate would be big and Rmoney needed something significant out of it to stay in the race. Kind of shocking that they then delivered a post-debate narrative that fulfilled their needs!

        • mike

          Wasn’t the narrative afterward that Romney won, but also that he misled? Why was that part dropped? Why is no one talking about “how” he won?

          I am really confused — if debates have not mattered before, how did the 1st one flip the entire race? Why didn’t the VP debate matter even half as much? Many questions …