When American voters go to the polls for a President in November they are choosing from two candidates. The candidate who receives more votes, in the Electoral College, will become President of the United States and is inaugurated in January. There are 538 electoral votes that must be voted on and the winner must get 270 of those votes to win. Candidates campaign throughout the country with a series of events that include primaries and caucuses, which lead to the selection of delegates that will be sent to their national conventions where they will make their case to party members for the nomination.
Just weeks after President Joe Biden ended his own campaign and endorsed Kamala Harris, the two Democratic candidates sat down Tuesday night for their first and likely only debate before Election Day. The race has been roiled by a number of factors since then, from Trump’s debate performance to the rise of white nationalists in the nation’s politics to a bombshell allegation of sexual assault against Harris.
But despite the hullabaloo that surrounds debates, they rarely change the fundamental dynamics of an election. Even when they seem to, like the Kennedy-Nixon, Ford-Carter and Reagan-Carter debates that were held up as examples of presidential races where debates made all the difference, those shifts rarely last very long.