LANDER, Wyo. — The latest Republican primary debate here for two state House seats covered energy, public lands and other stock-in-trade Wyoming political topics. The audience submitted questions on index cards. A local attorney moderated.
Just two things were missing from the otherwise ordinary event: half of the four candidates. They’d spurned the invitation.
“You’re going to hear what I have to say, but there’s silence here,” Lloyd Larsen, the District 54 incumbent, said as he gestured at the empty chair next to him. “It’s unfortunate.”
The absent challengers, both hard-line Republicans vying for districts so solidly red that no Democrats are running, had said they wouldn’t attend because they distrusted the local League of Women Voters — despite the chapter organizing the forum with the Fremont County GOP and its Democratic counterpart.
Their refusal, though event-specific, was far from unusual. Seeing candidates side-by-side is getting rarer as more contenders opt out of debates or forums with their opponents. Strategists, organizers and experts say the shift reflects not just an erosion of a ritual long central to American elections and democracy, but also a divided political landscape where sparring takes place online and candidates prioritize attention for supporters instead of the broader community."
Our country depends on people of different perspectives talking through the issues and trying to find common ground. I think we have a lack of civility in part today because we don’t really see that modeled by many political leaders,” said Gibbs Knotts, a Coastal Carolina University political scientist who has written about political debates. “It’s impossible to replicate through 30-second ads and campaign speeches.”
Some skeptics cite that lack of civility — the insults and misinformation that often overshadow substantial policy discussion — as reason to abandon debates. Knotts said he remains a believer, pointing to research that has found they help voters feel confident in their choices, particularly during primaries or when candidates are relatively unknown.
Debate dodging is occurring at the highest level, with former president Donald Trump refusing to take part in the Republican primary forums and, this month, pulling out of an ABC debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. On Thursday, he reversed course and agreed to a Sept. 10 date.
But skipping is also seen down-ballot, at every level, among Republicans and Democrats alike.
In San Francisco, a mayoral debate was called off in May after the three candidates bailed amid complaints about the sponsor and potential moderators. The same month, the Detroit Regional Chamber canceled a U.S. Senate debate after the front-runners, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and former congressman Mike Rogers (R), pulled out just days before. Then in June, a Hamilton County, Tenn., school board debate was scuttled when most candidates for contested seats — nearly all Republicans — declined to attend.
The Detroit chamber, which has hosted statewide debates since 2010, issued a terse announcement: “Today’s dynamics favor sound bites, clicks, and ‘likes’ and let political strategy take precedence over informing voters by standing ‘in the arena’ debating ideas, priorities, and values with others vying for the same position of public trust.”
The American debate tradition began in 1858 in Illinois, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln, argued in seven faceoffs over whether slavery should extend into new states. The first live, televised presidential debate, between Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, took place in 1960. But debates did not take off until the 1970s, becoming even more established with the formation in 1987 of the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
The group’s influence has waned in recent years. The Republican National Committee withdrew in 2022, calling it biased and unwilling to adopt format changes and other reforms. This year, Trump and President Joe Biden bypassed the commission to organize debates directly with television networks.
The number of debates in competitive U.S. Senate races declined steadily from 2010 to 2022, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. More candidates are also declining to participate in forums sponsored by more than 700 state and local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the league says. The organization is nonpartisan, though its national leaders’ support for abortion rights, gun control and the removal of Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol turned off some Republican candidates.
“We’ve been hosting these for over 100 years. The league has not changed,” said Dianna Wynn, the organization’s president. “If I were a voter, I would be asking why are some political candidates not willing to turn up and answer questions.”
Candidates’ refusal to debate makes sense, strategists note — for the candidates. For incumbents, they say, there is often only downside, with Biden’s campaign-killing performance in June as Example A. And redistricting has made many state and congressional offices less competitive, giving those in safe seats little strategic reason to debate.
Social media, meanwhile, offers candidates an easy avenue for communicating directly with voters in controlled messages. Yet it also guarantees that gaffes can circulate widely and endlessly.
It used to be you screw up on a debate, maybe that’s a bad 24-hour news cycle. … Now if you screw up on a debate, it goes viral and circles around the world several times,” said John Thomas, a veteran Republican strategist in Texas who works on state and national campaigns. He usually recommends that clients skip debates, in part because down-ballot audiences are more often small and composed of unpersuadable voters. “You could be doing a Facebook live. You could be raising money. You could be door-knocking.”
When Bexar County, Tex., Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores declined this spring to appear at events with her Democratic primary runoff opponent, her campaign told San Antonio Report that she was focused on “talking to voters directly throughout the precinct.”That was a disappointment to Brady Alexander, president of the Hot Wells Mission Reach Neighborhood Association, which, along with other community groups, had invited Clay-Flores to one of its candidate forums.
“My job is to ensure that members can make an objective decision on voting and meet with the candidates, not rely on fliers or assistants who come by or hearsay,” Alexander said. “We want to hear all sides.”
The forum was held anyway, with a seat for the absent commissioner. Missing it did not seem to harm her campaign: Clay-Flores won the runoff.
A steady increase in candidates who said no to the City Club of Cleveland, a longtime debate organizer, led its chief executive, Dan Moulthrop, to spearhead the Ohio Debate Commission, a collaborative of universities, media organizations and civic groups. The idea, he said, was to create a central authority to host high-quality debates and discourage candidates’ venue-shopping.
It has had successes, hosting several statewide debates. It also has had disappointments, with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine turning down its invitation to debate his 2022 primary opponents. The commission is trying to organize a debate between Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno, but Moulthrop isn’t sure the two will agree.
In central Wyoming, Scott Harnsberger said he made it a goal to organize primary debates when he became chair of the Fremont County Republican Party in early 2023, “to get our candidates practiced up for the general election.” When the local League of Women Voters approached him about teaming up for forums this summer, he was initially dubious. But it had the means to publicize the event, and he had the final word on the questions the moderator would ask.
“I feel it’s been very nonpartisan on their part,” Harnsberger said.
The chapter prides itself on focusing on voter education and participation, not hot-button partisan issues, chair Linda Barton said. “We live in Wyoming!” she said. “It’s not like we can go crazy.”
Still, five candidates running for legislative districts in the county did not buy it. Three are associated with the firebrand Freedom Caucus wing of the fractured state GOP, and together they took out an ad in a local newspaper declaring they would not attend any league events.
“We are not confident that the league is as nonpartisan as the league claims,” it read.
Some voters decried this in letters to the editor. Harnsberger slammed it in a letter of his own: If the candidates “will not face voter questions before the election, will they listen to us if elected?”
At the forum in Lander, a quaint county seat of 7,500, Rep. Larsen from District 54 sat at a table with Rep. Ember Oakley of District 55. She blasted campaign mailers for their opponents that she said spouted “verifiably false” information, including that both incumbents had voted against a property tax bill they actually had sponsored.
“I was raised with a live and let live form of conservatism that I believe has served as the heart of Wyoming for generations,” Oakley told the audience, gathered in a gracious library hall. “There is not one person that I represent that I will not have a discussion with.”
Nameplates for Larsen’s challenger, Tina Clifford, and Oakley’s challenger, Joel Guggenmos, sat on the table. Neither responded to interview requests.
Among the 50 or so people listening was Kristi Green, a retired district court clerk who had run several times for that job.
“Every four years, I had an interview with the people to see if I could keep my job,” she said, remembering the debates. “And it was important for me to have my opponents there so we could show our differences.”
The questions on this night had seemed fair to her, she said. She just wished she had heard the other candidates’ answers.