Presidential Debates: Why are they where they are?

While in class today, someone raised a good point about the location of the Presidential Debates. Why are these Debates held in the specific state, city, and venue that they are held in? This sparked my curiosity and I wondered what the answer to the latter question was as well as other questions. Have there been trends of the location of these debates? And finally, has holding a debate in a specific place had an enormous effect on the election as far as changing local citizen’s opinions on any one candidate?

Since the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, has organized every aspect of a presidential debate from the size of podium used to the candidate selection criteria, they are obviously in charge of proposing and selecting the location of the debates. According to an article titled "How Presidential Debates Work: The Ideal Debate" by Josh Clark, selecting a neutral site for a debate can be difficult. Specific rules must be followed in selecting a debate’s location. Debates cannot be held in either candidate’s home state or hometown. Since most of these debates are held at universities (which I have not been able to find a specific reason why – if anyone can find out why please respond to this post!) the debate also cannot be held at either candidate’s alma mater. Debates are usually held in larger cities because the CPD has a minimum requirement of 3,000 available hotel rooms and a $7,500 application fee. There is no verified statement form the CPD that debates are typically held in “swing” or “battleground” but the neutrality of a debate is crucial, and therefore an undecided state would be a much more neutral site for a Presidential Debate.

There is also evidence from past elections that debates have been held in states that proved to be key in the outcome of the presidential election. In 2004, Ohio was known as a battleground state, and the last of the four debates was held in Cleveland, Ohio. According to CNN,the very first televised debate in the 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon was held in Chicago, Illinois. Kennedy won that first debate and ended up winning Illinois, which proved to be a crucial state in helping Kennedy win over Nixon. (Click here for a full list of debates throughout history and their locations and dates) After looking over this list and counting how many times a certain state has hosted a presidential debate, including this year’s debates, I did find that Missouri has hosted a debate five times. This is two more than the states who have hosted it three times (Florida, Kentucky, and California). I found this trend to be odd considering that Missouri is classically a strong Republican state.

Two of the states (Colorado and Florida) that were locations in this election’s debates, as determined by The New York Times Electoral Map, are labeled at this moment “toss-up states” that could help either candidate win the entire election if they were to get the majority vote in that state. The other two states selected for the presidential debates were New York, a strongly democratic state, and Kentucky, a strongly Republican state. This balance of location partisanship is also evidence to the CPD’s policy of neutrality in the presidential debate sites.

A lot of the information that I found could merely be called coincidental, but I believe that the location of these crucial presidential debates has a lot more of an effect on the presidential election than one might think.