Presidential Debates

Tonight will be the first of three Presidential debates of the 2016 election. They are described as such:

"First presidential debate (September 26, 2016, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY)

The debate will be divided into six time segments of approximately 15 minutes each on major topics to be selected by the moderator and announced at least one week before the debate.

The moderator will open each segment with a question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond. Candidates will then have an opportunity to respond to each other. The moderator will use the balance of the time in the segment for a deeper discussion of the topic.

Second presidential debate (October 9, 2016, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO)

The second presidential debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which half of the questions will be posed directly by citizen participants and the other half will be posed by the moderator based on topics of broad public interest as reflected in social media and other sources. The candidates will have two minutes to respond and there will be an additional minute for the moderator to facilitate further discussion. The town meeting participants will be uncommitted voters selected by the Gallup Organization.

Third presidential debate (October 19, 2016, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV)

The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate."

So each candidate will have less than 7.5 minutes to address major topics tonight. And this assumes that there won't be any bickering or nonsensical discussion/yelling; based on their performances in the primary debates and other appearances, we certainly know that won't be the case.

Tonight's topics are: America's Direction, Achieving Prosperity, Securing America

This debate format does not serve the public very well in my opinion. It doesn't give the candidates enough time to state their stance and have a real debate on issues that matter the most to voters. And as you can see by the topics chosen for the first debate, they are extremely generic. As different television networks get each debate, I don't expect there to be any coordination of the topics to be discussed at each debate.

It would be ideal to have distinct topics for each of the debates (e.g. domestic/foreign policy). This would allow the candidates more time to state and argue their stances on topics. Each debate would be more meaningful as there won't be the repetition I expect from the three debates we'll see in the next month.

It's entirely possible that the candidates rather have the current format... I'm expecting more of the same tonight...