A preview of Thursday night’s presidential debate from a debate coach

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: An important moment in the 2024 presidential campaign happens tonight at 8:00 PM Central Time. It'll be broadcast on CNN with other media outlets, including NPR, picking up that feed. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will debate for the first time in the race.

It's unusual in that this debate is so early in the campaign. There are more than four months left until election day, and the candidates are virtually tied in the polls. The president has spent the past few days prepping in mock debates. Former President Trump has been on the campaign trail, doing some media interviews and talking with aides.

We wanted to hear from someone who knows what makes for a winning debate strategy. So we called up David Cram Helwich. He's the director of forensics at the University of Minnesota. He's also director of a summer speech and debate camp for high school and middle school students, which is currently underway at Augsburg University. David, welcome to the program.

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Hi, I'm glad to be here.

CATHY WURZER: Thanks for taking the time. I know you're busy at camp, so thanks for taking some time to talk with us here. Gosh, let's begin with some of the ground rules, shall we? No in-person audience, which is interesting. As a person like myself who has had a chance to moderate political debates, I prefer not having an audience. How might that change the dynamics?

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Well, it actually places the candidates in a pretty difficult position because they lose a lot of the important feedback you get from audience reactions. I mean, we're trained to read how it is people are responding to what it is that we're saying. We can even just pay attention to nonverbal cues, even if you ask the audience to be silent.

And so, for example, the candidates are going to have a more difficult time to know if particular examples land or resonate with their audience, if they have provided sufficient explanation for a point or they need to continue. And so, really, they're going to be playing a guessing game about how it is that the television audience-- or, well, TV audience, although people are going to hear it on the radio, like on MPR, tonight-- are reacting to their messages.

So I think actually, in many ways, it's much more challenging for the candidates. And I think that's especially true of President Trump who-- or excuse me, former President Trump, who has shown a really strong ability to read and react to audiences.

CATHY WURZER: Easier for the moderators, though, too. They can control the situation as best as they can. They don't have to control the audience, and they can focus on the two candidates.

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Absolutely.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah, they'll also have their mics muted when they're not talking, and that's to try to prevent the chaotic and combative debate the last time these two met. What do you think of interrupting and talking over an opponent as a strategy? Is that a debate strategy?

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: It is. The types of academic debates we do involve what is cross examination. So the different debaters present their argument, and then they're subjected to between two and four minutes, depending on the format, of cross examination. And that's actually really the form or part of academic debate that's most analogous to a presidential debate in that the judge or the audience in that case is able to see the two competitors side by side.

And when folks are doing that, it's the act of interrupting is a move of aggression. That's something that occurs even in interpersonal interactions or in conversations. And debaters, well-trained debaters, will use interruptions strategically to draw the audience's attention back to them, potentially to interrupt their opponent when they think they're making a particularly good point, or to interject objections or counter-arguments to something that they think their opponent is saying.

CATHY WURZER: Hmm. So when you watch tonight's debate, which I'm sure you will, what aspects of the debate-- what will you be looking for among the two candidates when it comes to communication?

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Yeah, so it is a long-held axiom in politics-- and this dates back to kind of a real change in the tenor of campaigns in the 1980s, particularly the 1988 Bush-Dukakis race, where candidates have increasingly shifted towards negative messaging.

You have to remember that the goal for the candidates in this debate is not to prove that they are the smarter person, not necessarily that they have greater command of the issues, but instead, what they're trying to do is they're trying to drive turnout. They're trying to motivate their voters and then demotivate the voters of their opponent.

And there's a wealth of social science research that demonstrates that negative messaging tends to be more effective than positive messaging. And so I'm going to be looking for the extent that the two candidates are driving at what they consider to be their opponent's weaknesses.

CATHY WURZER: If you were to coach either individual or both, I mean, what pointers would you give?

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Oh, wow. That's literally the $10 million question. My advice to Trump would be to remember or to focus on what he views as persuadable voters, either from what we would classify as independent voters, or the cadre of traditional Republican voters who have expressed in different polling and even in their voting behavior in the 2020 election, some discomfort with his kind of disruptive communication style and potential governance style.

And really try to focus on tying kind of the broader public dis-ease that folks feel about the direction of the economy, the state of the world, et cetera, and try to tie that to Biden. And as much as possible, make this race as much a referendum on the performance of the Biden administration over the last four years.

For President Biden, I think he wants to do the exact opposite. He wants to emphasize his steadiness, the fact that he tends to conform with traditional norms of presidential conduct and presidential leadership, and emphasize that Trump, when he was president and, certainly, as he's been campaigning, has been constantly flaunting or violating those norms to try to amp up the kind of discomfort that many moderate voters, including moderate Republican voters, feel about Trump's communication and governance styles.

CATHY WURZER: So as I listen to you, you still feel that there is room in this debate to sway voters. And that might seem a little counterintuitive, given that we have so much political polarization in this country, and a quarter of voters view both of these candidates unfavorably. So you think these candidates can still win people over on this debate stage.

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: I think they can. And we have to remember that the margins in the states that are going to decide this election, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, those races, in both the 2016 race and the 2020 race, were decided by 100,000 votes or less.

And so, even though the number of persuadable voters is relatively small, because most people have very firm opinions about both Trump and Biden, you can still persuade folks to vote with either how it is they feel about the current administration versus potential fears or the promise of a second Trump administration.

But the point that your question implies, which is that the candidates are also probably going to be focused on trying to drive turnout to motivate their voters and to demotivate voters they think are more likely to vote for the other side is certainly going to be central to both candidates' strategy.

CATHY WURZER: Will you use tonight's debate for your campers the next morning? Will you use this as a teaching tool?

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: Yeah, we will. We'll talk about it, although there are real differences between the type of academic debate that students participate in college and high school versus what they do in a presidential debate. But we will use it to talk about how ethos or about credibility and then pathos-based appeals, emotional appeals, factor into public debate.

CATHY WURZER: It should be interesting. I'm so glad you took the time to talk with us this afternoon. Thank you so much.

DAVID CRAM HELWICH: All right. I really appreciate it.

CATHY WURZER: I appreciate it, too. David Cram Helwich is the director of forensics at the University of Minnesota and also Augsburg University's summer speech and debate camp for high school and middle school students. Now, by the way, you can listen to the presidential debate. We will carry it live. Of course, it'll be on CNN, but we'll have that live audio feed starting at 8:00 PM Central Time. And of course, we will have analysis right after that debate.