Yeah... I Know... It's A Conservative Paper... But I Have To Agree Here:

[MineralMan]

47. Oddly enough, all of the arguments seem to assume that

Hillary Clinton will do poorly in debates, while other candidates, specifically Bernie Sanders will somehow benefit. The reality is that all of the three candidates whose names we're hearing will give a good account of themselves in the debates, and the differences between them are actually pretty minor, really.

Clinton will do just fine in such debates. So will Bernie. So will Biden, if he does decide to run. They'll all speak about issues that are important to Democrats. They may differ in the details of their ideas, but not in the fundamentals. Bernie will call for single-payer healthcare, while Hillary will praise Obamacare and say that she wants to expand it to help even more people. All will talk about a higher wage for our lowest-paid workers, call for social justice improvements, and immigration reform. The details may vary slightly, but all will be calling for similar things.

All will call for big money to be removed from the political process, and all will declare that Citizens United was a bad decision, one which will be affected by their Supreme Court nominees. None will directly attack the others, but there will be mentions of past votes and positions, all of which are pretty familiar to most voters.

Bottom line is that these debates will probably not materially affect voter response, which will be based on general opinions and feelings about the candidates. Probably the candidate who will get the biggest boost will be Martin O'Malley, since he has the poorest name recognition right now. Bernie's getting press, so his name recognition has improved. Biden is an unknown, since he won't have declared until just before the first debate.

Six debates will just about be all the Democratic voting public will care about. They'll all be much the same, and pretty bland, overall. There's just not enough difference between the candidates for the debates to be all that interesting. I doubt they'll get anything like the GOP clown show debates. In fact, I doubt they'll change anything much, really.

We'll see. The first one's coming up fairly soon. It will be interesting to see how the candidates handle it. The rest will just be echoes of the first one. The debates will not swing the primary elections, though, in my opinion.