Trump rejects second Harris debate - eviltoast
  • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    She needs to still show up as scheduled, say that just because trump won’t make time for the American people doesn’t mean she will ignore them

    That reminds of the 2020 presidential election in Poland when both candidates did exactly what you describe - they debated at the same time but in separate studios. And the story how it came to that is wild.

    This was after the first round of the elections (where two candidates are selected for the second round), which involved things like last-minute rescheduling of the elections, last-minute candidate swap and effectively throwing away 20 million dollars of public money. Currently there are several criminal investigations conducted against people involved in organisation of that first round. And of course it was all in the middle of the pandemic. So the political chaos was at its absolute peak.

    The two candidates were the country’s president representing then ruling party and capital city’s mayor representing then biggest opposition party. Both of course wanted the debate. The issue was that then ruling party turned the public broadcaster into a party propaganda machine compared by experts to that created by Goebbels. And the core of that propaganda was that the second biggest (private) broadcaster in Poland (owned by Discovery Group) is anti-Polish and cannot be trusted.

    Both broadcasters offered they can organise the debate. The private one I believe was also willing to jointly host it. But the ruling party candidate couldn’t agree to a debate hosted by the private broadcaster because that would significantly impact the propaganda and expose his many wrongdoings to the manipulated ruling party voters.

    On the other hand, the opposition candidate couldn’t agree for the debate hosted only by the public broadcaster because that would effectively be 2 hours of him trying to deny lies spread by hosts and the other candidate.

    The 2nd round was coming close and no compromise has been found. So on the same day the two broadcasters prepared their studios for two candidates with audience. Ruling party candidate went to public broadcaster, opposition candidate to private one. Both declared the other as a “no-show” and proceeded to have a “debate” with hosts and audience.

    Few days later the opposition candidate lost by a small margin.