2024 Presidential Debates: What You Need to Know

This article originally appeared on CDM.press and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Christine Dolan

In November 2023, the Commission on Presidential Debates, which was established in 1987, booked four locations for the 2024 presidential debates starting after Labor Day 2024 when early voting begins in some states.

The four locations include: 

First presidential debate:
Monday, September 16, 2024
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX

Vice presidential debate:
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Lafayette College, Easton, PA

Second presidential debate:
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA

Third presidential debate:
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

All this back and forth about debates between the Trump and Biden campaigns is nothing but drama. They will happen because the voters are demanding debates. The media is demanding debates. When the U.S. government supports democracy abroad encourages debates. 

Trump has been saying he wanted to debate and Biden was saying all along it depended upon “Trump’s behavior,” up until recently. 

During an interview with Howard Stern, President Joe Biden said he would debate. 

Now, Ron Klain, who has swung in and out of government for decades and prepared a host of democratic candidates for debates recently joined the voices saying there would be presidential debates during an interview on MSNBC with former Biden Press Secretary Jan Psaki.

But, as usual in any presidential campaign creates a new narrative that the debate commission rules must be enforced so that there is “equal time” to hopefully not have a slug fest of sorts. 

“I think what we have to see is something different than we saw in 2016 and 2020, where the debate commission lost control of the debates, Trump didn’t follow the rules at all, he talked over his opponents, there wasn’t a fair division of time, it was more a spectacle than a debate. That’s always going to be true with Donald Trump on the stage,” said Klain. “But we need to have debates where the candidates get equal time, where there is an orderly way of proceeding, where they can be heard, where it’s not a shouting match, where the American people can compare the two people who are the leading candidates for president.”

Plain said that the rules have to be “enforced.”

What is not stated is that the debate commission does enforce the rules and has the ability to cut off a candidate’s mike, and Ron Klain knows that. 

Will Trump and Biden debate alone? 

According to the debate commission, it all depends if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gets on state ballots equaling at least 270 electoral votes. 

So far, Kennedy’s campaign has not achieved that number. 

To date, though Kennedy’s campaign has been successful getting on the ballots in several states. 

The Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is officially on the ballot in California, the largest of the electoral state count. 

The American Independent Party of California officially nominated Independent Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice Presidential Candidate Nicole Shanahan this past weekend and filed paperwork with the California Secretary of State on Monday.

The Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is officially on the ballot in Utah and Michigan. The campaign has collected enough signatures for ballot access in seven additional states including New Hampshire, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, and Iowa. 

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