More than 1,300 days since they were last in the same room, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will converge tonight for the first presidential debate of the 2024 race.
If tonight’s debate in Atlanta seems a little different, that’s because it will be: The studio won’t have a live audience, for instance, and the candidates’ mics will be muted when it’s not their turn to speak. In another rarity, there will be two commercial breaks, during which Trump and Biden won’t be allowed to consult with advisers.
The debate is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. ET and last for 90 minutes.
In yet another break with tradition, tonight’s debate will have no live audience watching the candidates.
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When this change was first announced, my colleagues Zeeshan Aleem and Ryan Teague Beckwith wrote posts arguing for and against the shift, respectively. Ryan thought that a crowd would play to Biden’s strengths, while Zeeshan suggested that the audience’s reactions dull the important roles that debates play in our democracy.
Personally, I think both of them make good points, but they managed to forget a key factor here. Namely that, unlike in primary debates, it has always been the norm that general election debate audiences have been instructed to remain silent except when the candidates take the stage and at the end.
With that in mind, CNN’s decision to not have people sitting silently in a darkened auditorium is a change that does little to affect the status quo.
