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The first rule for determining who wins in major political debates is that no one wins in major political debates. There’s no final score determined when the buzzer sounds, no wink at the end, it’s a purely subjective matter. And that will also apply to the vice presidential debate between Republican candidate J.D. Vance and Democratic candidate Tim Walz.
That being said, I recently adopted a method of scoring arguments from the boxing world. I think this actually gives a pretty decent assessment of what most American voters are seeing.
My advice when deciding the winner is to borrow the scoring system from a boxing match. The basic rules are relatively simple. In each round, the winning boxer in 3 minutes will receive 10 points and the loser will receive 9 points. However, unless there is a knockdown or overwhelming victory, the round will be scored 10-8. It’s a 10-10 draw.
Naturally, the match ends with a knockout.
Walz emphasizes “significance and importance” as Vance during vice presidential debate
I first tried this approach last month during the Trump-Harris debate. And I ended up with Trump winning 157-150. That was not the only reason I thought and wrote that Trump won the debate that night, despite the media’s overwhelming claims that his female boss, Kamala, did a terrible job. But that was part of it.
And given the fact that opinion polls have not shown much of an uptick for Ms. Harris since the showdown, and that some of Mr. Trump’s battleground states have even increased sharply since the debates, my look at this… Shina Trump’s declaration of victory seems a little less insane today.
The traditional news media, which wanted an excuse to give Harris the W anyway, saw this tête-à-tête as a kind of Lifetime movie in which Harris finally spoke truth to power, but the American In most areas of the world, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t have much to buy. Voters want answers.
The who, what, where, and when of Tuesday’s J.D. Vance-Tim Walz vice presidential debate
That’s where boxing scoring comes into play. If the opening, closing, and each question is a “round” of the debate, you’ll end up with about 15 points. You know what I mean? The respective score increases of 10 to 9 or 10 to 8 reflect the nuances of how volatile voters view this event.
The basic philosophy behind boxing scoring is that your main job is to survive the round, so if you can manage that, you automatically win the round by scoring 8 points, which can be increased up to 2 points. That means all you can do is raise it.
David Marcus’ scorecard for the 2024 Trump-Harris debate
Some might argue that there is a fundamental injustice here. This means that even if I am 40 percent better at landing punches than my opponent in a round, I only have a 10 percent advantage in scoring. But that’s also the beauty of this system. Fighting is not just a matter of mathematics.
This is actually very consistent with how political debate works.
The audience, the voters, tend to see each question or issue as one round, and if Walz can get 10-8 on abortion, or Vance can do it on the borderline, that’s a good thing for some kind of policy. It will be a big step forward. Mr. Trump won against Ms. Harris by seven points.
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Another way to think about this is that 90 percent of Americans likely already know who they will vote for, and only 10 percent can influence The system is almost fully compatible with this.
80% to 90% is just scoring as a wash.
Of course, a knockout is a possibility, but these days that seems unlikely. This was the issue at the time, when President Reagan said, “Here we go again,” and when President Obama, in retrospect, mistakenly told Romney that he wanted him to return to foreign policy in the 1980s because of fear of Russia. There was a possibility that something close to a consensus could be reached.
Those days are no more with us, if not forever.
No one actually wins in a debate, but you can still score them and pay close attention to who actually answers the questions and who doesn’t. This has a lot of value.
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Give it a try, grab a pad and paper if you still have them, and write down your score for each question as 10-10, 10-9, or 10-8. Like a Ouija board, your political leanings may drive your pen a little, but you might still be surprised by the results.
As Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Take a look at the rhetorical hands of Tim Walz and J.D. Vance.
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