WESTFIELD—After the second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took place Sunday night, it appears that it’s personality rather than policy that will be determining who will be the nation’s next president.
And in order to help make sense of this latest debate, The Westfield News talked with Westfield State University political sciences professor Dr. David Smailes to get a recap of the event and what people can take away from the town hall debate.
Smailes said that personalities have come to dominate not just this debate, but the entire election season so far, which has meant less discussion about policy.
“More so than any other election I can think of, it’s about personality and people’s feelings on these candidates, and that’s not what we want elections to be,” he said. “Policy has not been front and center.”
Smailes believes that the debates should be highlighting candidates’ policies and their plans instead of the scandals and flaws that have come to the forefront of this election.
“It was really kind of disappointing in a way, because I think they were a good 20 minutes into it before they got into any substance of an issue that people wanted to hear about, but that’s a nature of the politics that we are at now,” Smailes said.
Smailes believes that this, at least in part, has caused the slumping of Trump going into the debate. Smailes said that after the 2005 video was released on Friday where Trump said that he could freely grab women by the genitals Trump’s poll numbers dropped considerably, especially with women voters. It fit the script that personality is more disruptive than policy, according to Smails.
This provided a backdrop for Trump where he was already battling negativity heading into the debate, which Smails believes took precedent over the Sunday night event. Then, the focus for the debate in large part was not about policy, but about scandal, whether it was Trump’s or Clinton’s.
And when scandals were raised, even though Smailes believes Clinton was unable to respond well to Trump’s accusations involving Benghazi or emails, Trump still couldn’t come away a winner. Smailes believes this is because of one scandal Trump pushed that republican leaders did not want him to push.
“One strategy they very specifically apparently said to Trump was to not pursue the Bill Clinton angle,” Smailes said. However, once he did with a pre-debate press conference with several accusers, Smailes said “I think that’s undermined the party’s confidence in him.”
Now, with the fact that Trump doesn’t seem to listen to his party’s counterparts, combined with the 2005 scandal, Smailes believes that there is a good chance that the Republican National Committee could pull their support of Trump over this and refocus it toward senate and house of representative races that are now battling damage from Trump.
“It’s pretty clear [yesterday] morning and after Paul Ryan’s announcement [yesterday] afternoon that he does not plan to campaign for the ticket,” Smailes said of Ryan. “The leadership has lost any hope that Trump is going to win this election. They’re looking for damage control, looking to save the house and senate races as much as they can.”
Of course, Smailes was not just critical of Trump, as he saw several moments where Clinton faltered, as well. One such example was in responding to the final question from the audience, where a member asked the candidates to “name one positive thing” about each other.
Clinton responded by saying that she respects Trump’s children, rather than saying something about Trump himself.
“I thought her response was a weaker response” Smailes said. “When it happened I thought, ‘you need to do better than that’. It’s a prime moment to reach people in a way, and I think she had several missed moments like that.”
Smailes said that Clinton also appeared to have struggled with empathy and getting voters to connect with her on a personal level, and that is something that she has seemed to always struggle with.
He said that she needs to connect with them at more than a “policy level,” but the format didn’t allow for a back-and-forth conversation with the voters, so the ability to do this was limited.
Overall, Smailes said that each candidate got what they wanted out of the debate, but the early polls saying Clinton had “won” the debate may be off the mark a bit. Instead, Smailes described it as both candidates winning and effectively tying.
“I think Trump did what people thought he would do and that he would demonstrate that he has presidential stature and present himself in a sort of way that makes him seem like he could be president,” Smailes said. “In that sense Trump came out ahead of the game, but Clinton didn’t have as much to lose.”
Smailes added that Clinton was superior in policies over Trump, which helped her in the end.
The next debate is Oct. 19 at 9 p.m.
