The October presidential debate at the University of Utah risks cancellation after President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump agreed to schedule their own debates on June 27 and Sept. 10. These plans do not involve the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized and sponsored presidential debates since 1988.
In Nov. 2023, the Presidential Debate Commission announced three sites and dates for the 2024 presidential debates. They chose Texas State University, Virginia State University and the U to host the events. However, Biden’s surprise announcement excludes these events, and risks canceling the debate at Kingsbury Hall on Oct. 9, 2024.
In 2020, the U hosted the Vice Presidential debate. Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, described it as an “enormous success” for the university.
“So we’ve been actively pursuing getting the beginning of presidential debates here,” Perry said. “We were thrilled when it was announced that we would be not just one of the universities that hosted but the host of the third and final presidential debate.”
According to the Washington Post, the Biden campaign wrote a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates on May 15. In the letter they outlined their grievances about the commission’s conduct of debates.
“The commission’s model of building huge spectacles with large audiences at great expense simply isn’t necessary or conducive to good debates,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in the letter.
According to NPR, the National Republican Committee announced it was going to leave the commission in 2022. A unanimous vote based on beliefs that the commission is biased in the way it conducts debates finalized the decision.
Biden announced that he would debate Trump twice and urged the former president to “pick the dates” in a video he posted last week. Trump responded on Truth Social, stating he is “Ready and Willing” for the proposed debates.
Mason Hughes, the communications director for the Utah Democratic Party, expressed disappointment about the debate’s cancellation in a statement via email.
“While we are disappointed that President Biden will not be visiting Utah for the Presidential debate, we acknowledge that his decision to opt out of the debate is largely driven by the Republican National Committee’s 2022 decision not to participate in debates organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates,” Hughes wrote. “It is our hope that President Biden will still visit Utah on the campaign trail.”
The Utah GOP Party did not respond to request for comment.
However there is still some hope for a potential presidential debate at the U. Perry remains optimistic that something could change.
“No one has called and said, ‘you need to stop it, [the debate] is not going to happen.’ So, we are going to continue to plan the best we can in the hope that there is some resolution,” Perry said. “And my hope is that there’s still a possibility. No one has told me that is it for sure. But they also have not told me that it is absolutely not the case.”
Perry said the U expects to hear confirmation about the future of its role in the coming weeks.
