Believe it or not, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will meet next week in Philadelphia — for the first time.
That’s right – Harris, who entered the US Senate at the same time that Trump entered the White House, who had a breakout moment during the cross-examination of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and two of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, and who ran against him being president, has never met Trump.
Unless they’ve had some kind of backstage run-in before, the handshake at the start of Tuesday night’s ABC News debate will be a first-person interaction.
For that reason, the debate is must-see TV.
But there is another historically atypical reason why this debate – maybe more than any other since John F. Kennedy v. Richard Nixon in 1960 – can be decisive in deciding who will be the next president.
Historians generally agree that the presidential debates have been insignificant over the years in terms of changing the minds of voters.
This is because, according to Dustin Carnahan, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, debate viewers “tend to be among the most politically engaged and thus able to make up their minds before the debate.”
“For these people,” he continued, “debates are largely a spectator sport, watched primarily to see how their preferred candidates perform and have little effect on the candidates’ opinions.”
One clear and recent exception was the debate between Trump and President Biden, which was a disaster for the latter. Even among some die-hard Bidens, the debate forced the painful reality that he could neither defeat Trump nor complete a second term. It changed the race completely, but it was an outlier.
Another reason debates are becoming less important is that fewer people are listening. The Biden vs. Trump debate saw a 30% drop in viewership from the first debate in 2020, and viewership has fallen steadily from its peak in 1980, when 80.6 million people tuned in to watch Ronald Reagan take on Jimmy Carter.
Each debate was attended by fewer than in 1980, in some cases 50 million fewer viewers. Until 2016.
The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump broke that record with 84 million viewers. After a wild primary season, interest in the Trump/Clinton face-off is high – how will they handle it? How could she handle him? For the same reason, the same dynamic will play out next week as well.
Another good reason to be skeptical, but this debate will have an impact, is convention. Typically, a candidate will get a post-convention bump in the polls, and it can be significant.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was up in the polls by 30 points after the Democratic National Convention in New York City. In 2000, Al Gore trailed George W. Bush by 16 points, and at the end of the DNC in Los Angeles, they were tied.
Trump and Hillary Clinton had a little post-convention bounce in 2016.
But this year, according to an ABC News/IPSOS poll conducted after the DNC in Chicago, Harris’ post-convention numbers were flat. And also, Trump improved by just over one point in the polls.
This perhaps goes back to Carnahan’s point – that people who attend debates and conventions are already politically motivated, so they are loyal voters whose minds do not change.
But all this stops when you talk about uncommitted voters.
“(S)ome research has suggested that candidates’ debate performances can impact how favorably they are perceived by voters, which can affect the choice of undecided voters,” says Carnahan.
And undecided voters — especially in swing states — will largely decide the 2024 election.
I spoke with market research expert Elizabeth Jarosz last week, who partnered with IPSOS to poll undecided about, well, being undecided. He said many said they were waiting for this first debate to decide who to vote for.
That means Harris and Trump have a big chance on Tuesday night to shake up the exact voters they need to swing this election.
Tight margins have been the story of this election, with both campaigns struggling to win over new voters. They know this race can come down to a few thousand votes in one district in one swing state.
On Tuesday night, Harris and Trump will go head-to-head, before an audience full of voters who say it’s what they’ve been waiting for. The big question is, who will benefit?
SE Cupp is the host of “SE Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.