I don’t get the fixation on not answering the question…it’s a common occurrence in debates as the essential strategy is to give abbreviated versions of your stump speech and avoid direct responses unless they’ve got the perfect response available. And that rarely happens because in those cases the moderators already know what the response is.
Fixation of the viewers or the candidates? It personally drives me crazy when it is a simple yes or no question, and leaves it to the viewer to draw a negative inference. I do get it when there is nuance to something and the answer needs to be qualified, but to just give a completely non-responsive answer is quite irritating.
She blew me away in those hearings. She's is ridiculously smart and capable. And her campaign is proving that. She's been out there for two whole months and everything has gone as smooth as you can imagine. It's astounding how smooth actually. I can't remember a campaign that makes so few mistakes.
It’s really rare tho to see a genuine yes/no question in a debate format - candidates have a couple minutes to respond so they’re expected to provide context to their answer.
How about: "If you are presented with an abortion ban, will you sign it?" That's as black or white as you can get. At least with a question like "Do you want Ukraine to win its war against Russia?", there is room for equivocation on defining "winning". But he didn't do that. He said he wanted it to end. The implication, combined with his adoration of Putin, complaining about its cost, and WW3, is that he will cut/eliminate funding, which means no.
I would add that you can still give a general yes/no answer, and qualify it and provide context and potential exceptions. I would expect that. I don't expect a candidate, at this stage of the process and on that stage, to simply answer a different question that was not asked. Harris did it right of the gate too, which bugged me. But she looped back later in the debate and answered it then.
