Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would not be participating in any debates in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, solidifying expectations the by-and-large frontrunner for the Republican nomination was likely to skip the GOP's upcoming debate in Milwaukee this Wednesday.
Trump holds a commanding lead over the rest of the Republican field, with his next closest competitor—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—sitting more than 30 points behind him in most national polls. The former president arguably has more to lose than any other candidate, with unparalleled name recognition among all candidates and with a long list of opponents whose main strategy for winning is to attack him.
Some, however, are worried that skipping the debates could set a precedent that would allow President Joe Biden to dodge direct confrontation with his chief political opponent, leaving Trump little room to chip away at the on-the-fence independent voters who cost him the election in 2020.
According to The New York Times over the weekend, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reportedly warned Trump that by skipping the debate he could give Biden an excuse to get out of debating him should they face one another again on the ticket in 2024.
Others in conservative media agreed.
"If Donald Trump says 'Everybody knows me, I don't need to do it,' then Joe Biden does, 'Everybody knows me! I'm the president," Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy said on the program Monday morning.
Meanwhile, a much-hyped debate between Biden and Trump ended in disaster in 2020 after a chaotic debate performance by both, deemed by some, as the worst in the history of the modern presidency. Biden is already facing multiple questions about his mental acuity and ability from an electorate that is already leery of him or Trump serving another term at their advanced ages.
But skipping Wednesday's debate, particularly with his current lead in the polls, is the only move Trump has against a field that is only bent on attacking him.
"With such a large lead, that there's just no way risk of being on stage and making a gaffe, you know, something that's disqualifying or would make people think about supporting someone else," Aaron Kall, an expert on presidential debates at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek.
The strategy, as others noted, could potentially mean no debates in 2024. Fortunately for both men, a debate whether good or bad is unlikely to move the needle much when it comes to voters.
And beyond Richard Nixon's poor performance to a much more photogenic John F. Kennedy in their landmark 1960 debate, research shows presidential debate performances tend to have little bearing on the final result. Polling from Reuters/Ipsos conducted in October 2020 showed very little change in voter attitudes about Biden and Trump when they first debated, a sign of solid polarization between Democratic-leaning voters and Republican ones.
The biggest deciders, experts previously told Newsweek, will likely be issues of policy like the state of the economy, which polling shows is currently the top issue for voters of both parties in 2024.
If the economy is bad when voters go to the polls, experts say, Trump would then be able to use his forum to attack Biden on his performance. However, if there's no advantage to be had, they added, Trump himself might not participate at all.
"I think in a way if you didn't have to debate Trump and Trump were the one who pulled out, it might be might be a secret blessing for Joe Biden, but that's that down the road," David Greenberg, a contributing editor at Politico magazine and an expert on presidential debates at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, told Newsweek in an interview.
"There's nothing that's going to affect Trump versus Biden until next spring at the earliest," he added. "I just don't think anything that's happening this summer and fall is going to bear on Trump versus Biden. We have to see where the economy is, we have to see where the war in Ukraine is, we have to see a lot of other things, Biden's condition.... We know from recent elections, you know, the cliche that a week is like a lifetime in politics. That's even more true now than it used to be. If the election was three weeks earlier (in 2016), Hillary would have won."
In April 2022, the RNC unanimously voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates over its alleged "biased" moderator selection process, putting future debates in doubt.
"We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people," McDaniel said in a statement at the time.
