There was almost a substantive debate on Fox News

Yes I watched and I hate myself for it

Source: NBC News

Last night Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom of California held a debate on Fox News, moderated by anchor Sean Hannity. It was deeply unpleasant to watch. But watch it I did. And since you, with your actually fulfilling life, probably didn’t, I’m going to provide a few reflections for you, in helpful Q&A format.

What was the point of this event?

There actually is a bit of history of potential future presidential rivals facing off against each other across party lines, although these types of things don’t happen very often. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with prominent Democrats and Republicans getting together for spirited discussions about issues. There should be more events like this! Just not, you know, this.

So what was so terrible?

It was two male chimps vying for alpha position. They just kept talking over each other and calling each other liars and trying to be as obnoxious as possible. Look, I’ve watched plenty of political debates and am not naive about how these things often go, but this was really unusually irritating. Newsom mocked DeSantis for losing to Trump. DeSantis brought out a map of poop in San Francisco. It went on like that.

Here’s a clip:

Was there any substance?

Here’s the weird thing: it was actually substantive. I’m generally not one to praise Sean Hannity, and his framing of the questions was pretty much the opposite of objective. But he had two bright second-term governors in his studio and was asking them some substantive questions about state politics, such as:

• If California’s such a lovely place why is its population dropping?

• California and Florida had highly dissimilar Covid policies, yet ended up with roughly the same death rate per capita. Why?

• What does it mean that California has more mass shootings than Florida despite more stringent gun ownership laws?

If you were teaching a state politics and policy class, these would actually be very good questions for class discussion or an essay question. And the candidates could have talked about things like rising housing costs, or the challenges of actually measuring health outcomes, or the importance of controlling for things like population size, wealth, etc. They could have mentioned the ways that other states have sought to deal with these complex issues, what seems to be associated with success or failure, and more. I don’t doubt that these governors have actually had such conversations with state legislators and policy staff.

But they didn’t go that route. Instead, where the statistics were inconvenient, they brought up other statistics, yelled at each other, said they were in bed with the radical fringes of each other’s parties, and more. And then again with the poop map.

Seth, you know that a substantive policy debate does not make for good television

Compared to what? The debate they actually had was not good television! I’m sure the researchers at Fox News know what their audiences like, and they’ve got plenty of data suggesting that angry people yelling at each other is better for business than eggheads discussing marginal tax rates. But I rather doubt that this was a major hit-maker for the network, or that this did much for either Newsom’s or DeSantis’ careers.

One out of five stars; do not recommend.