One of the interesting thing about Presidential debates is how two objective people can watch the same event and yet come away with entirely different opinions as to the outcome. To a degree, this is the result of honest disagreement but I think that it can also be attributed to human nature. No matter how hard we try to be fair, we can’t help but be affected by our personal opinions of the individuals involved. Image plays a larger role in things than we might like to admit.
This fact was demonstrated rather dramatically in the 1960 Presidential debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Those who listened to the debate on the radio generally thought that Nixon had won while those who watched on television felt Kennedy was the winner. Since both groups heard exactly the same things the only thing that could have caused such different opinions was the visual aspect of the television audience.
Today this impact is even more significant as we are constantly fed images of how we should perceive each man and this can’t help but alter our views of who performed better. I have been considering if there is any way that we could try to get a totally neutral observation of these important events.
I’ve come up with an idea which, while admittedly unlikely to be put into practice, would be an interesting experiment to carry out, if not this year perhaps in 2012.
I would propose getting a group of undecided voters who have not viewed any debates or discussions between the two leading candidates. This would help to prevent them having a preconceived notion of what each contender is like. They would then be isolated on the night of the debate and would not be allowed to see or hear anything about it.
Once the debate was over the transcript of the debate would be taken and redacted to remove any names, changing the names of the candidates to something neutral like letters of the alphabet. You would also remove any political attacks like claims that one candidate is too old, inexperienced, etc.
The objective would be to cull things down to where you just had the direct answers to the questions (or as direct as is possible in a modern debate) left. This portion of the process would probably require representatives from both camps to make sure everything was as fair as possible.
Once you had this quasi-neutral script it would be delivered to the focus group by actors who would alternate in whose answer they delivered. Or in the alternative you could have several actors for each candidate. This would be to avoid any bias in terms of the observers liking a particular actor. With each question the group would be asked to pick the answer they liked best both in terms of agreement with their own views and in terms of what they thought was the best/most direct answer.
From this you would determine who won the debate without as little bias as possible. It would probably be of minimal benefit in terms of the people choosing a candidate but it would be interesting to see if the scoring of ‘who won’ differed in comparison to the polls of those who watched the direct debate.