Category: Presidential Debate Reports

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2024 Republican Presidential Primary Through Third Debate

In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.

The following report continues our analysis for the Republican primary debates in anticipation of the general election next fall. This report covers the third Republican Primary Debate, hosted by NBC News on November 8, 2023. Topics covered include the distribution of issue topics in the debate questions, the number of questions asked of specific candidates, and candidate speaking times. 

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2020 Presidential Debates

In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote. 

Across all the 2020 debates/town halls, Covid was the dominant question topic, accounting for over a quarter (27%) of all questions asked. Covid is followed by social issues (17%) and electability (14%) as a second tier of question priorities, followed by the economy (8%), the judicial system (7%), climate (7%) and foreign policy (6%). A next lowest tier was comprised of presidential priorities (5%), health care (5%), and immigration (3%), with a few questions devoted to other candidates (1%) or education (1%). In 2016, electability (29%) and foreign policy (27%) were the clear question priorities, while during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the priority was social issues (19%). 

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2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Debates

In past presidential elections, the Winston Group has analyzed the primary and general election debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are the most important for them in choosing for whom they will vote.

The following report continues our analysis for the Democratic primary debates in anticipation of the general election this fall. In the previous debate, before the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, questions about foreign policy or national security were the most-represented, followed closely by questions about other candidates and their policies and/or prospects. Across all the debates so far, questions about social issues (a broad category including guns, abortion, and race relations, as well as general division and polarization in the country) have taken priority, with foreign policy and, somewhat more recently, candidate electability also emerging as priority topics in the debates thus far.

This report will continue our analysis, with information from the previous ten debates and the newest information from the CNN March 15 debate, featuring Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden only and moved to Washington, DC without an audience amid coronavirus concerns. 

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2016 Presidential Debates

Throughout the general election season, the Winston Group has been analyzing the presidential and vice presidential debates to quantify how the question topics interact with voters’ key concerns for election day. As noted in our previous report on the last presidential debate, jobs and the economy remains the number one issue for general election voters.

In the debates, questions about electability and foreign policy are well-represented among all the debate questions. In fact, these two topics tie as the most asked-about topics across all three main debates and the vice presidential debate. As for the questions posed to each candidate, the two tickets are roughly even when it comes to the number of questions received pertaining to the different topics. Trump-Pence, however, slightly outpaces Clinton-Kaine in both number of questions received and overall speaking time. They also continue to receive more questions about electability when compared with Clinton-Kaine.  

Here, we present our analysis of debate topics, number of questions addressed to candidates, and more for the third and final presidential debate. As we also stated in our last report, many voters report feeling dissatisfied with the current state of political discourse, a dissatisfaction that is markedly worse than it has been in recent years. As the election draws closer, understanding how well the debates address voters’ concerns is key.

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2016 Democratic and Republican Presidential Primary Debates

The Winston Group has been analyzing the Republican primary debates to build a picture of how the topics covered interact with what voters have said — through surveys and exit polls — are their greatest concerns and the issues that are most important to them in choosing for whom they will vote in 2016. 

Across the first two Republican primary debates, we continued to see a pattern we had first noticed while analyzing the 2012 primary debates — that while the economy is the top issue for Republican primary voters, it struggled as a question topic in debates. While the third debate, hosted by CNBC, was supposed to be completely focused on questions on the economy, the topic still fell far short as many other topics were introduced. Although questions about the economy comprised the greatest percentage of overall questions to date in the fourth Republican debate, hosted by Fox Business/WSJ, the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino dramatically shifted the tone of the debates and the priorities of the question topics. Questions about foreign policy and national security began to take center stage. Foreign policy and national security remained an incredibly important and much discussed topic moving into 2016. It was the most asked about topic in the January 14 debate hosted by Fox Business, a trend which continued in the ABC News Feb 6 and CBS News Feb 13 debates. In the CNN Feb 25 debate, immigration was the most asked about topic, but in the Fox News March 3 debate, foreign policy and national security returned as the most asked about question topic, followed by electability and immigration tied for second. In the CNN/Washington Times March 10 debate, foreign policy and national security tied with electability as the most popular question topics.    

Here we continue our analysis of debate topics, candidate speaking times, and more, including information from the twelfth Republican debate and ninth Democratic debate. How well did the debates address the concerns and questions of voters? 

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2012 Republican Presidential Primary Debates

The Winston Group analyzed the 2012 primary election debates, looking at the following questions:  How well did the questions reflect the issues that voters wanted to hear about? Which networks and which anchors asked the most questions? And which candidates received the most questions?

Over the course of twenty debates in eight distinct states (and the District of Columbia), the Republican candidates were asked 719 total questions. By analyzing trends and questioning patterns that existed in 2012, we can develop some context for the 2015-16 debates. In this report, we present notable findings from our research. Perhaps the most striking insight from 2012: though Republican voters consistently said (in primary exit polls and surveys) that economic issues were their top priority in determining who to vote for, questions about the economy were largely underrepresented throughout the debates.

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