Get to know Presidential Debate Time
The famed series of seven debates between U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas for U.S. Senate—the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 —took place around Illinois and led to the presidential campaign of 1860, when both were nominated for president.
CHARLESTON, South Carolina The eight candidates vying to be the Democrat nominee for president in the 2008 elections answered questions submitted by CNN and YouTube users in a debate Tuesday night.
The nominees of the two major parties did not debate until 1960, when Republican Vice President Richard Nixon faced John Kennedy, the junior Democratic Senator from Massachusetts.
During presidential elections in the United States, it has become customary for the main candidates to engage in a debate.
Although the 1960 debates were popular with the public and broadcast nationally on network television, presidential debates took a hiatus until 1976.
Their absence is due, for the most part, to incumbents refusing to debate and federal communications laws which required equal time for all presidential candidates, even minor ones.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper will moderate the two-hour debates and pose follow-up questions.
Presidential debates are held late in the election cycle, after the political parties have nominated their candidates.
WASHINGTON — For the first time in presidential debate history, user-generated video will drive two unprecedented debates.
COOPER: Senator Dodd, you’ve been in Congress more than 30 years.
COOPER: Senator Obama, your supporters say you are different.
Immediately after the debate, user questions and candidate answers will be featured prominently on YouTube where people can interact with the content through YouTube’s community features, extending the life of the debates.
In every case, those are new ideas, bold ideas, that I campaigned on and then were able to achieve in the United States Senate by bringing Republicans as well as Democrats together around those issues.
The first debate for the 1960 election drew over 66 million viewers out of a population of 179 million, making it one of the most-watched broadcasts in U.S. television history.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN host: Our first question tonight is Zach Kempf in Provo, Utah.
CNN and YouTube’s live forum will feature video questions submitted to YouTube which will be broadcast and answered by Democratic and Republican candidates on CNN.
The debates in front of voters who had no direct say in the election was seen by some as a violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
“These debates take the bold step of embracing the ever-increasing role of the Internet in politics,” said Jim Walton, CNN Worldwide president.
The first general election presidential debate was held on September 26, 1960, between U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, and Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, in Chicago at the studios of CBS ‘ WBBM-TV.
And that is something that I’ve got a track record doing, and I think that is what the American people are looking for in this election people of both parties as well as independents.
The press played up Ford’s remark as a major blunder, and many analysts thought it helped Carter win the election.
The same year the two major political parties assumed control of organizing presidential debates through the Commission on Presidential Debates.
“YouTube enables voters and candidates to communicate in a way that simply was not possible during the last election,” said Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube.
The debates are very useful for swing voters who, before the debates, have never seen the candidates without some type of a media filter.
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On September 23, 1976, Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter and Republican incumbent, President Gerald Ford agreed to 3 debates on television before studio audiences.
No general election debates at all were held for the elections of 1964, 1968 and 1972, although intra-party debates were held during the primaries between Democrats Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and between Democrats George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey in 1972.
The nation was intrigued by the Lincoln/Douglas debate topic more than the actual Senate race, which Lincoln lost.
The year 1992 featured the first debate with a third-party candidate, Billionaire Ross Perot running against President George H. W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton.
The formats of the debates have varied, with questions sometimes posed from one or more journalist moderators and in other cases members of the audience.
