TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – The future of Florida general election debates are unclear as we head toward November.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly declined all general election debates with Republican candidate Byron Donalds on Sunday.
Jolly cited the current campaign environment and Donalds “bad faith.”
“It is clear, given the tenor of the current campaign environment, including Byron’s repeated lies and bad faith, that debates this cycle would not create constructive, honest conversation and only further stoke division, animosity, and bad will. That’s not something I wish to do for out state,” Jolly said in a press release.
According to that press release, Jolly said he accepted multiple debates before this week that Donalds declined.
Florida Politics
On Monday, Donalds released a statement saying Jolly’s decision to not debate is “dodging having to defend his too far left positions.”
“We can understand why Jolly wouldn’t want to get up and defend his crazy liberal agenda in a debate,” Donalds’s statement read. “It’s because his campaign is too far Left and too expensive for Florida.
Just before Jolly’s announcement on Sunday, Florida A&M University announced they would be hosting a statewide gubernatorial debate.
The debate, which would have been in partnership with Spectrum News, was scheduled to be one hour and live-streamed across the state.
The university is now working to determine if the debate can continue in any capacity.
Two political science professors we spoke to said the decision to decline all debates was an odd one.
“We need to know that they can actually perform at that level. So I don’t think the nature of it is in general mostly performative, but performance is important in politics,” said Dr. Lonna Atkeson, Director of the LeRoy Collins Institute at FSU.
During the primary campaign, it was Donalds, not Jolly, refusing to debate. Now the situation is reversed, and we’ll have to wait and see how voters react.
Traditionally, the person seen as the “underdog” in a race would want to debate, experts say. After all, Florida has more than a million more registered Republicans than Democrats, but the importance of debates is falling.
“Unless it’s something really catchy and intriguing and at a place that’s so interesting, there probably isn’t going to be a huge demand from the media to press these candidates to have (a debate),” said Susan MacManus, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida.
Atkeson said Jolly’s reason for not debating wasn’t very strong.
“I don’t think that’s a very valid excuse for not debating. I mean, politics is filled with a lack of clarity and disingenuous feelings on both sides,” Atkeson said.
Still, MacManus said there is a school of thought that advocates against debating.
“One is that if you’re behind, but you think you can make up time and the debate may take away from your time, then you say, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said. “Anytime you are offered to do something of that nature and you say no, it does look to a lot of people like you’re dodging.”
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