On Wednesday, Sept. 11, speakers Andrew Perrin and Leila Brammer analyzed the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in an event hosted by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute. Their discussion extended beyond the topics of the debate to evaluating debate techniques, questioning what calls for fact-checking and analyzing the structure of the arguments.
Perrin is a SNF Agora Professor of Sociology and is the chair of the Department of Sociology at Hopkins. He is a cultural and political sociologist and his research is focused on civic and democratic ideals and behaviors.
Brammer is the Director of Outreach and Instructional Development for the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse at the University of Chicago. Her work emphasizes building frameworks for understanding issues from multiple perspectives and developing evidence-based approaches.
In an interview with The News-Letter, Stephen Ruckman — the Managing Director of the SNF Agora Institute and the event organizer — described the importance of a post-debate discussion with experts.
“We know there’s a lot of punditry right after the debate, but most of the pundits have an angle they want to pursue and they’re not thinking about the bigger picture — why debates matter, or if they matter,” he said. “We have expertise in this discourse and dialogue, so we wanted to bring that to students so they can see the debate in a deeper way.”
During the discussion, Perrin pointed out the lack of engagement between those with opposing viewpoints in political discussions.
“The thing we are most missing in our public discourse is access to good disagreement. Most people will talk to and read stuff by people who they tend to agree with, and are pretty isolated from really good competing arguments,” he said.
Perrin described the debate as exciting because it offered information voters could use to understand who the candidates are, how they approach big questions and how they think about important issues.
Later, Perrin discussed his intrigue with the way Trump attempted to use absurdity throughout the debate. He addressed Trump’s claims that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — pointing out that though Trump may have been attempting to provoke fear, the tactic was ultimately unsuccessful.
“Saying all of this is outright ineffective because the creation of the absurd actually works to his disadvantage,” he said.
Brammer focused on the debate strategies used by the candidates. She described the debate as less chaotic than Trump's previous debates in 2016 and 2020.
“[Trump’s] strategy in the past was to create chaos in the debate...that was memorable, getting a lot more press headlines going out of the debate. This time, there was structure,” she said.
Brammer also mentioned that Harris was able to take advantage of Trump’s tendency to defend himself to ultimately control the debate, even when she avoided answering questions directly.
“Every question she shifted, she gave a different answer, which was usually focused on optimistic views of the future or she tied [Trump] to the past and gave him bait,” she said. “It was a really brilliant strategy.”
In an interview with The News-Letter, sophomore Aneesh Swaminathan talked about how Brammer brought attention to details he missed while watching the debate.
“I certainly learned a lot that I didn’t catch when I first watched the debate, like a lot of the rhetorical techniques that Kamala used,“ he said.
The debate notably featured fact-checking by the moderators in real time, which the speakers also discussed. Perrin suggested that the media focuses too much on verifying the accuracy of facts instead of analyzing what values the candidates choose to emphasize in order to attract more support.
Sophomore Sophia Tyrrell-Knott shared her perspective on the how of fact checking in an interview with The News-Letter.
“I don’t think [the discussion] really changed my perspective on the debate last night, but it made me think about things that I wouldn’t have thought,“ she said. “It made me think about the importance of policy versus truth or argumentation in debate.“
