Possibly a naive question, but spell it out for me in simple terms.
Who decides? How do/does he/she/they score it and come up with a winner? Does the moderator actually declare a winner? No doubt Trump will declare himself a winner no matter what.
I haven’t watched many of the debates and may not be able to bring myself to watch this one (sober, anyway), although if there’s a play-by-play thread on this board, I’ll follow that.
Expect the winner of the debate to be determined by the candidates camps. Clinton’s team will insist she won, Trump’s team will insist he won. When they last met for that Commander-in-Chief forum, I Googled the winner and found a site that showed Trump had won it by 65% to 35%. Even after voting 18 times, it was still pretty much the same.
There will be a some media time devoted to fact checking and things like that, but your scorecard is as good as anyone’s. I’m betting there will be a thread here in Elections that will be ongoing during the debate, when everyone cheering Hillary’s comments, and booing old hamster-fist’s comments.
There is obviously no official scoring. Three things that point to who has “won” the debate:
a) Analysis by political pundits
b) Viewer polls and focus groups about the debate
c) Movement in election polls in the days after the debate
These indicators may contradict each other but they usually lean in one direction. For example in 2012, all indicators pointed overwhelmingly to a Romney victory in the first debate and less clearly to an Obama victory in the second and third debates.
There is no score or official winner or anything like that. The “winner” is whoever comes off better. If that sounds vague or hard to determine, it is. The only way to really know is to see how people are reacting to it. Unless one candidate does absolutely terribly (like Obama in the first 2012 debate), it might take a few days to see how actual people viewed it.
Don’t get hung up on things like facts and policy. Those are distractions. Telling an obvious glaring five-alarm whopper (like “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe”) would be bad, but this is mostly a dog-and-pony show. For an example of how shallow this is, I knew Obama lost that debate within the first minute or two, when Romney handled the issue of the Obamas’ wedding anniversary more warmly than the president did. This is obviously an unimportant issue, but Romney had been seen as uncaring and aloof and he was the nicer person on the stage that night.
Um, I think you meant “Russian” domination. So I think we can guarantee that Trump will say at least one totally inane thing in each debate that’s at the same level as “[Putin]… is not going into Ukraine”. It won’t matter to Trump supporters but please please please I hope his obvious total lack of understanding of policy and issues will sway some un-decided’s slightly more than Clinton being sick for a few days. Am I hoping for too much?
umm…not quite!
The winner will be announced 60 seconds after the debate ends.
It will be decided immediately.
It will be announced definitively.
It shall be proclaimed frevently.
Yea, verily, even unto the ends of the earth, the angels of the lord shall declareth the glory of the annointed winner, who shall hencefore sitteth at the right handeth of God.
So , folks: pick very carefully which channel you choose to watch the debates. Otherwise, you’ll surely see blasphemers who annoint the wrong winner.
Me, I don’t have to worry. I’m going to be at work during the debate, so by the time I get home, I’ll already have heard how each candidate is the annointed one.
So I think I’ll just log in here to read the thread with the play-by-play commentary.
Should be more fun.
I was quoting Gerald Ford in one of the 1976 debates.
The “winner” and “loser” will be judged according to largely subjective and stylistic terms. The post-debate follow-up, the focus groups, and the post-debate online media blitz will influence who will ultimately be perceived as the perceived ‘winner’. The selling of the winner is just as important – maybe even more so – than the perception of who won in real time. It’s entirely possible for viewers to think “Oh wow, Hillary answered that well” and then later change his/her mind after reading news feeds about how Donald ‘won’ the debate.
If you can be the least bit objective regardless of which side you’re on, just watch the post-debate spinning. Whoever has to spin hardest lost.
Since this race is so bitterly partisan (more so than any I can remember and I am fairly old) I suspect lots of folks have engaged their psychotic - oops my bad - meant psychic - abilities and already know who won.
I’m stunned. I guess I AM naive.
I truly did not realize that there was no “official” determination of the winner, not even a bogus, half-assed, semi-official declaration, a paper tiger that then everyone could attack. It really is an open-ended crap shoot with no judge or referee to raise one person’s arm in the air at the end?
So each side will obviously declare itself the winner, right?
I guess audience reaction will figure into it, like on Queen for a Day (any senior citizens remember that 1950s show with host Jack Bailey?), where the winner was determined by applause in the studio? I like the idea I proposed a while ago: no studio audience. Only the moderator and crew. Let both candidates speak to a silent room with no cues from a crowd. Donald would probably refuse to attend unless there’s a crowd for him to play to. Hillary would do fine on her own.
Whoever has the best memes.
:eek:
Please tell me both candidates will remain fully clothed at all times!
To win, Hillary will have to move mountains and slay dragons. For The Donald to win, all he has to do is not make a mess on the floor. Any slight mistake Hillary makes will be met with howls of glee and gnashing of teeth, punctuated with wails of despair. Any monumental gaffe the orangutan makes will be ignored by all.
Few, if any, politicians would agree to a format where one was declared “the official winner”.
Trump will. He doesn’t want to give away even the smallest secret.
It is an interesting side note on the Kennedy Nixon debates that the audiences who saw the debates on TV thought that Kennedy had won whereas those audiences who heard it on the radio thought Nixon had won.
This discrepancy can be at least partially attributed to the fact that Kennedy had a much more camera friendly visage and the networks (it late came out) had manipulated things (through makeup, lighting and camera shots) to further enhance Kennedy’s advantage.
Nixon, on the other hand, had a stronger voice and spoke with the neutral midwest accent that most of the u.s. prefers over the New England ont that Kennedy had. And this played out perfectly for Nixon.
“Queen for a Day” was truly insipid - kinda like several months of competing tragic soap operas condensed into one show. The irony of that show (and it is true for all game shows - this one was just more poignant given its nature) is that when contestants win they are responsible for all the taxes on their winnings since it is treated as income. And the contestants (by their prescence on the show) likely did not have the money to pay the taxes on all this stuff (much of which on reflection were fairly worthless pragmatically to a poor family).
Actually, this is probably more than just a witty post on your part. I suspect there’s more than a shred of fact in it.
I would expect the hosting network to assemble a panel of pundits, have them score the debate and come up with a winner, like on those talent shows. Fuck what the politicians “agree” on.
You must REALLY be old, like me, to even remember this show. It was a modest program and TV was in its infancy.
The only presidential debate I’ve ever seen where there was a “winner” was in the first Romney/Obama debate in 2012 where pretty much anyone with eyeballs (and without an agenda) determined that Obama barely showed up.