There may be no U.S. Senate debate in Missouri. Here’s why that’s becoming more common

There are two types of political candidates that want to debate: candidates who are trailing in the polls and candidates who think they’ll wipe the floor with their opponent.

By that standard, there should be several debates for the U.S. Senate race in Missouri.

Democratic nominee Trudy Busch Valentine is considered a long-shot candidate in the general election and needs to find some form of momentum to beat Republican nominee Eric Schmitt. She is also a stilted public speaker and Schmitt, Missouri’s attorney general, has spent years in government and is a more polished politician.

Instead, the two candidates are shadowboxing on social media — sending out barbed tweets, likely work-shopped by top campaign staff.

Despite Schmitt’s decision to skip Friday’s Missouri Press Association forum, his campaign posted video of Busch Valentine’s performance at the event to make the claim on Twitter that she’s avoiding televised debates. Her campaign responded by posting a video of Schmitt’s empty podium at the forum and says it’s Schmitt’s team that won’t agree to debate.

They’re hardly the only U.S. Senate candidates in the country bickering about how, when and whether to debate before the November 8 election. In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman agreed to one debate after being hounded by Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, who said Fetterman was dodging because he recently suffered a stroke. In Georgia, Republican candidate Herschel Walker set expectations low for the event, saying he was “not that smart,” after agreeing to share a stage with Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock.

“Debates are one of the very few things left in modern campaigns which are largely unpredictable,” David Kensinger, a longtime Republican consultant in Kansas. “And for campaign teams that are trying to control events, that’s a very scary prospect.”

Those unpredictable events may be disappearing.

The Republican Party in April withdrew from the Commission on Presidential Debates — the highest profile version of the form in the country — calling the commission biased. The decision, which could mean there will be no presidential debates in 2024, comes amid increased political polarization and high distrust in institutions.

Kensinger said that because debates are often moderated by the press — just 5% of Republicans say they trust newspapers and 8% say they trust television news, according to a July 2022 Gallup survey— candidates are less likely to be punished by their voters if they skip debates.

“There’s more distrust among Republicans and independents than there is among Democrats,” Kensinger said. “So there’s less of a price to be paid for Republican candidates [who skip debates] because their base has less confidence the process of the debate will be fair.”

Campaigns have become increasingly focused on their base voters given the polarized electorate, where they often have better success mobilizing voters rather than trying to persuade people to vote for their candidates. The practice has led to higher voter turnout, but it often doesn’t give politicians a reason to try and broaden their appeal beyond the most consistent voters in their respective parties.

“There isn’t much of an undecided electorate left,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “There’s a disaffected electorate, which you could potentially mobilize, but disaffected electorate is not likely to watch debates”

Jamieson, who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and studies political communication, can rattle off a number of reasons why debates are still important to voters. They help a voter become more knowledgeable about candidates, they can help politicians govern better because they’re more informed about the other side’s arguments and they help voters understand how a politicians will make decisions once they’re in office.

“They also provide the only real opportunity we have in campaigning, to hold candidates accountable to the arguments on the other side, in a venue in which the audience can watch to see whether or not they believe the candidate and find the response credible,” Jamieson said.

One thing they rarely do, however, is sway voters.

Christopher Reeves, a former Kansas Democratic national committeeman, said that while he thinks voters lose something when campaigns don’t agree to debate, there is enough information available to people online that they don’t feel the need to tune in.

“They can take a few minutes and find out everything,” Reeves said. “And so in that environment, there’s just less interest in seeing a debate. People look at it like I could spend that hour watching something on Netflix.”

If a debate does influence an election, it’s rarely because of a candidate’s strong debate performance. Instead, it’s usually because of a mistake a candidate makes in the high-pressure situation.

In Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, said he didn’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach their children. His opponent, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, played the audio clip repeatedly in television ads, extending its reach far beyond the audience of the debate itself. After the election, some Democrats pointed to the clip, and the Republicans’ emphasis on education throughout the election, as a factor in why Democrats lost the race.

“It’s not the debate itself, it’s the seven-second mistake that gets replayed 1000 times on television,” Kensinger said.

Some campaigns are still willing to take the risk. In Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, which is projected to be a close race between incumbent Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids and Republican Amanda Adkins, the two campaigns have agreed that the candidates will debate twice before the general election.

The campaigns for Davids and Adkins were able to coordinate to determine which debates they would participate in. The same can’t be said in Missouri.

Both Senate campaigns refused to answer questions about whether they were working together to find an opportunity where they could appear.

Schmitt agreed to a debate hosted by Nexstar Media and Busch Valentine agreed to one hosted by three local television stations, St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis American, a weekly newspaper that serves the Black community. The campaigns are accusing each other of being afraid to appear before the voters, but neither has bent on their conditions.

Neither candidate had to debate in their respective primaries either. On the Republican side, there were no debates that included all six major Republican candidates, in part because of a disagreement in terms between Schmitt and former Gov. Eric Greitens. On the Democratic side, Busch Valentine didn’t agree to any of the same debates as her opponent Lucas Kunce after a late entry into the campaign.

“These are important jobs — U.S. Senate, governor, president of the United States, member of Congress — and part of these jobs is persuading the public,” Kensinger said. “And debates are a good test of that. That’s been true since the earliest days of the Republic and it’s still true.”