In his July 28 radio show, 630 KHOW host Dan Caplis focused on whether Republican gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx ought to agree to a debate with his Democratic opponent if the moderator is 9News commentator Kyle Clark.
Caplis admitted that Clark is liberal, noting that Clark tends to be hostile to Republicans and that he protects Democrats. But Caplis thought that, on balance, it might be okay to debate with Clark at the helm. Marx might be able to turn the situation to his advantage. Marx, for his part, has said he will not do a moderated debate.
I’ve been there personally—and I respectfully disagree with Caplis. Except under unusual circumstances, a conservative or free market candidate should never participate in a debate sponsored by a hostile organization or supervised by a hostile moderator.
I say I’ve been there because I have. I ran for governor of Montana twice. I debated my principal opponents many times. The debates had different formats, but nearly all had one thing in common: The sponsors were almost entirely liberal media outlets or “establishment” groups hostile to my candidacy as a conservative populist outsider.
I learned that it is possible for a biased host or moderator to exercise the restraint necessary to ensure a fair contest. But I also learned that in the real world, this kind of restraint is rare. The incentives to influence the results are too powerful, and the opportunities are too plentiful.
Additionally, a smart sponsor or moderator can bias things in ways that leaves him with “plausible deniability.”
How it’s done
I’m going to offer some examples, but let me be clear that I’m merely reporting, not whining. These events all happened more than 25 years ago, and I’ve never written about them till now.
Physical setup. A sponsor can adjust the physical setup to help its favored candidate. There are several ways of doing this:
• You can use lighting to manipulate audience perception. Arguably, Republican Richard Nixon lost the presidency to Democrat John Kennedy because CBS, the liberal sponsor of the first 1960 television debate, used lighting that made Nixon look haggard and pale. In one of my debates against the media/establishment favorite, his podium was placed in light while I spoke from shadows.
• You can help the shorter candidate by placing him far from his taller opponent. Or you can hurt the shorter candidate by putting him next to his taller opponent. You also can help or hurt the shorter or taller candidate by choosing the height of a table or podium.
• You can choose a sound system that favors one kind of voice or speaking style over another. You can make a man sound authoritative and a woman sound squeaky.
• You can choose a background that clashes with a disfavored candidate’s usual dress.
And so forth.
Loaded questions. A hostile sponsor can ask questions skewed to make a candidate seem querulous or extreme. Thus, in a debate between a conservative or a liberal, a left-wing moderator might ask, “What would you do to increase funding for our underfunded public schools?”
The liberal will welcome the question and set forth his or her plan. The conservative will have to quarrel with the premise of the question: “Well, Jim, I don’t think our schools are underfunded… ” Answering like that doesn’t look so good.
Similarly, a moderator can focus questions on one candidate’s strengths or weaknesses. The October 22, 2020 NBC Biden-Trump presidential debate was supposed to be about foreign policy—which had proven to be one of President’s Trump’s strengths. But the liberal moderator mostly asked questions about COVID-19, race, the economy, and climate change—issues on which Trump was much weaker.
A related kind of question-loading is to ask questions that totally disregard the issues the disfavored candidate is running on.
Slipping the favorite the answers in advance. This is a particularly disreputable tactic, but I’ve seen it done. At one debate against a not-very-informed opponent, I noticed that she was uncharacteristically slamming one obscure question after another out of the ballpark. She did not do that in any earlier or subsequent debate.
It was clear that someone affiliated with the debate sponsor had given her the questions, and perhaps the answers, well before the debate.
I adjusted on the spot, adopting a tactic that contained the damage. But my opponent sounded so good that a contest I should have won resoundingly turned into a draw.
Biased media takeaways
When newpapers and other media companies organize the debate, they can “report” the results in ways that emphasize what they like and ignore what they don’t.
Thus, they can ignore a liberal’s major slipup, while stressing a conservative’s minor mistakes. They can even manufacture “mistakes” by taking statements out of context, as they did when “reporting” Barry Goldwater’s 1964 statements about the Vietnam War or selectively editing President Trump’s 2017 comments in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Although I avoided any slip-ups in my own debates, I also learned how the media can manipulate takeaways. Here are two examples:
#1: In each of my campaigns there was a debate in which my opponent thoroughly embarrassed him- or herself—once by being caught in a documented lie and once by revealing inexcusable ignorance. Those attending the debate saw what had happened and thought I’d won smashing victories. But the next morning the sponsoring news organization made no mention of either incident.
#2: In 2000, I participated in a debate against four more liberal opponents. The sponsor was a liberal daily newspaper. The following day the newspaper printed debate photos showing each of my four opponents in various poses of dynamic action. The photo of me showed me with my head down, staring at the floor.
In fact, I was merely listening carefully to an opponent’s argument. But to the newspaper reader, it looked like a picture of pure dejection.
Can you prevent the bias?
A candidate can forestall some sponsor manipulation by carefully negotiating conditions in advance. But in the heat of a campaign, thorough advance work is not always possible, and omissions are inevitable.
Moreover, every candidate makes some mistakes some time, and in today’s media environment, it takes only a single slip-up to destroy a conservative candidacy. A conservative doesn’t get pass after pass after pass like Joe Biden or Graham Platner.
Anyway, it is simply impossible to prevent some kinds of abuse. Who would have thought that the debate sponsors would give my opponent the questions in advance? Or that NBC would suddenly change a debate on President Trump’s strongest issues into one focusing on his weakest?
And once it happens, the candidate can’t do anything about it except walk out. And that looks very bad to the uninformed, which includes most people.
Little upside, big downside
Most political debates actually change very few votes. They really are moneymakers or attention grabbers for the sponsors and gladiatorial contests for the audience. They usually don’t offer much upside.
But they can take a lot of preparation time—time better spent on other campaign activities. And for a conservative in the world of the prevailing media, a debate can be a minefield. A single inadvised step can be fatal.
True, under some circumstances, candidates can find debates useful. But conservative and free market candidates must ensure that the moderators and hosting organizations are either truly neutral or have very powerful incentives to act that way.
Sorry, Kyle, but you don’t qualify.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor, is Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver. He authored “The Original Constitution” (4th ed., 2025) and is a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.”
