NEWS ANALYSIS : Pundits and Polls May Pick Debate Winner

The decisive moment in tonight’s presidential debate will likely come after the combatants have left the stage and the press has taken over.

And if history is any guide, the verdict on who prevailed in the St. Louis face-off will have only a passing connection to who mastered the issues, debated well or demonstrated the skills to govern.

Instant polls conducted by the media--sometimes with spurious findings--can profoundly sway how the public ultimately reacts to a debate. Ronald Reagan, for instance, benefited from a questionable survey following his 1980 debate with then-President Jimmy Carter.

Which 15-second sound bites get replayed by television news programs can transform an insubstantial one-liner into a defining moment. The 1988 Democratic vice presidential candidate, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, was aided by this phenomenon.

And the media’s apparent need to pick a winner, usually by pinpointing a turn of phrase or a gaffe as decisive, can turn something the public initially did not seem to care much about into a historic moment. This happened to Gerald R. Ford in 1976.

For all of this, however, debates tend not to change the course of elections. Instead, they have been found to reinforce and intensify the impressions people already have. And that would appear to make President Bush’s bid to use tonight’s debate--and the two that follow in barely more than a week--to overcome Democrat Bill Clinton’s lead in the polls more difficult.

“Bush has to change people’s minds,” said Doug Bailey, a former Republican media consultant who is publisher of the Hotline newsletter, a daily compendium of polls and press accounts of the election.

Still, Bush and his supporters can take heart that many of the old rules may prove useless this year. In part, this is because no presidential debate has ever included a third candidate.

The presence of independent Ross Perot on the debate stage changes the event’s calculus. Most analysts believe that as a result the press will have a harder time picking a clear winner or loser.

The clearest lesson of the five elections that have included presidential debates--1960, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988--are that they are more a kind of American Kabuki--a specialized Yankee performance art--than technical forensic battles.

Recognizing this, campaigns work on a candidate’s body language, appearance and small bits of visual staging.

In 1984, Walter F. Mondale practiced and executed “the pivot,” a carefully orchestrated turn designed by the Democrat’s handlers in which he would face Reagan and demonstrate equal stature while still looking respectful toward the popular President.

In 1980, Reagan, as part of an effort to show he was a non-threatening figure, crossed the stage and shook the hand of a surprised Carter.

Often, the aim of these devices is to bypass the media and influence voters directly. The objective is to offer viewers subtle visual--and thus supposedly more genuine--cues that a candidate is up to the presidency.

“The one area where there is a consistent pattern of evidence about debates is that the person with the most to gain from these encounters is the person who has yet to demonstrate that he is ready to be President,” said Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political science and communication at UCLA.

But like any theatrical event, success often depends on the press notices. And the way the press comes to view a debate is a subtle and fluid process built over several days.

It begins before the event, when campaign handlers try to manipulate expectations.

Bush has been doing that for weeks. “I’m not an Oxford-trained debater,” he has said several times, in a reference to the schooling Clinton received as a Rhodes scholar in Britain.

Clinton aides have countered that Bush--given his participation as either a presidential or vice presidential candidate in the 1980, ’84 and ’88 campaigns--”is the most experienced debater since Abraham Lincoln.”

Plus, the Democratic operatives insist, Bush is good at delivering one-liners, while Clinton tends to drone on and on.

The press and political insiders believe that Clinton has the easier test to meet.

“Bush needs to not just win, but blow him away. Clinton would have to get laughed out of town,” said one network White House correspondent. “And that isn’t likely to happen unless Clinton comes out with his underwear on his head.”

Such expectations unquestionably influence how the press interprets a debate. Of late, however, the “instant analysts” have avoided rendering strong judgments for fear of being accused of influencing the process.

The most important factor now, most experts agree, is the instant polls conducted by the media following a debate.

“The research is almost inescapable that the public perception of who won the debate is shaped in large measure by the public reports of what the public thinks about the debates from polls,” Bailey said.

One problem is that these early polls are not necessarily accurate. The sample sizes tend to be small, and the people interviewed in those first hours tend to be uncertain about what to think.

In 1980, immediately after the Reagan-Carter debate, ABC conducted a poll that was scientifically unreliable--it was based on people calling in. The results, swayed in part by a phone-in effort by the Reagan campaign, were favorable to the Republican. Many analysts believe that helped establish him as the winner of a debate that analysts initially had judged as close.

The second key factor shaping the public consensus is which moments of videotape get replayed in the days following the debate.

In 1988, the instant analysts ruled the vice presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Bentsen a tie. Expectations for Quayle were so low that he was viewed, as CBS’ Bob Schieffer put it, “to hold his own.”

But over the next few days, the sound bite of Bentsen telling Quayle “you’re no Jack Kennedy,” was replayed over and over. The debate came to be viewed as a Democratic triumph.

Kathleen H. Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the reliance on such sound bites in post-debate coverage highlights “single silly moments” and undermines whatever substance the events provided.

But the press also has played a “legitimate” role in helping viewers sort debates, said Larry J. Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia.

The classic example was 1976, when Ford said there was “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

The public at first saw that debate as close. Some polls even showed Ford winning. But after days of the press replaying and discussing Ford’s misstatement, the consensus shifted. Ford, who was gaining in the polls, stalled for a week. It may have cost him the election (he finished 2.1 percentage points behind Carter).

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in St. Louis.

President Bush has no public events scheduled.

Ross Perot has no public events scheduled. TELEVISION

Bush, Clinton and Perot participate in a presidential debate at 4 p.m. PDT at Washington University in St. Louis. All four networks, CNN, PBS and C-SPAN will televise the debate.