EDITORIAL: Why are Democrats ducking and dodging debates?

OPINION:

A 1935 slapstick comedy film, “Uncivil Warriors,” starring the Three Stooges featured characters named Lt. Duck, Capt. Dodge and Maj. Hyde.

This election cycle, “duck, dodge, and hide” appear to be the preferred tactics of some Democrats running for office — while at the same time running from their opponents rather than debating them.

That’s neither comedic, slapstick or otherwise, nor in keeping with civil political discourse.

Unwillingness to debate one’s opponent should be considered a disqualifier because debates are the best available forum for prospective voters to size up candidates and their positions on the issues side-by-side.

From the 7th Congressional District of Virginia to the governorships of Arizona and New York, Democratic candidates have offered lame excuses for either canceling scheduled debates or refusing to agree to debate at all, or postponing debates as long as possible, until after tens or even hundreds of thousands of early votes have already been cast. (As of Oct. 23, CBS News reported, 7 million votes have already been cast across 39 states.)

Since you can’t change your vote once it’s cast, postponing debates until after weeks of early voting greatly reduces the risk of voters changing their minds if a candidate makes a major gaffe on the debate stage. (Just as an aside, that’s reason enough to sharply reduce the period for early voting, which in some states is absurdly long. In Virginia, for example, early voting has been underway since Sept. 23.)

In Virginia, two-term Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, backed out of a 7th Congressional District debate with GOP challenger Yesli Vega that was supposed to have taken place on Oct. 21.

Four days before, on Oct. 17, a Spanberger spokesperson blamed Ms. Vega, accusing her of wanting a conservative radio talk show host as the debate moderator. WMAL-FM’s Larry O’Connor — who Team Spanberger characterized as “a right-wing radio host known for spreading lies, hyper-partisan vitriol, and hatred against Democrats” — is mild-mannered and hardly a fire-breathing conservative, which the incumbent would know if she bothered to listen to his Washington-based morning-drive radio show. In any event, Mr. O’Connor withdrew his name from consideration, so that excuse was little more than a fig leaf.

The Spanberger spokesperson sought to shift blame by claiming that Ms. Vega had “pulled out of multiple nonpartisan forums, including with local chapters of the NAACP and other local committees.” But the NAACP, effectively an arm of the Democratic Party in support of its far-left agenda, is hardly nonpartisan.

In backing out, Ms. Spanberger likely wanted to avoid having the debate audience be reminded that, despite having won the purple swing district in both 2018 and 2020 with less than 51% of the vote, she has supported House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s and President Biden’s far-left agenda 100% of the time in the current 117th Congress. As such, she clearly isn’t the centrist she claims to be.

The unabashedly conservative Ms. Vega said the lack of a debate will be a “missed opportunity” for voters in Virginia’s CD-7 to get “real answers” about the issues they’re most concerned about and to compare the two candidates side by side.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, refuses to debate her Republican rival, Kari Lake, on the flimsy grounds that she’s supposedly a “2020 election denier” (a mantra dutifully echoed by a dishonest liberal media) and therefore doesn’t deserve to be given a debate platform.

To the contrary, Ms. Lake unapologetically argues for election integrity — which everyone should be for — and she’s quick to counter that dozens of Democrats have engaged in election denial about the presidential races of 2000, 2004, and 2016 — all won by Republicans.

More likely, Ms. Hobbs is afraid of a side-by-side comparison on a debate stage with Ms. Lake, whose public speaking ability was honed by more than two decades as a TV news anchor in Phoenix — and who doesn’t suffer liberal media fools gladly.

Even Ana Navarro, one of the two never-Trump nominal Republican co-hosts of TV’s “The View,” acknowledged the obvious. “Katie Hobbs is not debating Kari Lake, because Kari Lake was on TV for 22 years, and is very good on TV, and Katie Hobbs seems not to be,” she said on Oct. 17.

A day earlier, Ms. Lake told CNN, “The people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs, who won’t show up on a debate stage.”

Tonight, U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, the GOP nominee for New York governor, will finally get to confront Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in their one and only debate.

“That even one debate would be held has been a matter of some contention,” The New York Times reported Oct. 23, noting that Mr. Zeldin had challenged Ms. Hochul to a series of debates, but she would agree to just one.

Initially, the paper reported, the GOP challenger “refused to accept the date in protest, noting that because it came so late, many voters would already have received and filled out absentee ballots.” When the governor held firm on the sole debate date, however, the congressman relented.

Whether these Democrats’ ducking, dodging and hiding — a ploy akin to Mr. Biden’s 2020 basement bunker strategy — can save their political bacon on Nov. 8 remains to be seen.