mytakedotorg / us-presidential-debates

The United States Presidential Debates

U.S. Presidential Debates

Reaching for these ideals by following these steps.

Inclusion criteria

This factset contains every televised United States Presidential Debate. This factset does not currently contain any Vice Presidential Debates, although we plan to add them in the future.

Notes

The first Presidential Debate took place in 1960 between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. No one agreed to do them again until 1976, when Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford revived the tradition. They almost didn't happen in 1980, but eventually did, and they have continued to take place every 4 years since then, up to and including the most recent Presidential Debate in 2020 between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

When new Presidential Debates take place, we will add them to this factset as soon as possible.

Changelog

[Unreleased]

[2.1.0] - 2024-06-28

• New event: Added 2024 Biden Trump 1 of 2, 2024-06-27 (PR #13)
  • Note, this event collided with our naming convention, so we prepended 2024 to the fact's title. Tracking this in #14.

[2.0.0] - 2020-10-28

• New event: Added Biden Trump 2 of 2, 2020-10-22 (PR #12)
• Changed title of published fact: The second of three planned presidential debates was cancelled, so there were only two. Renamed biden-trump-1-of-3 to biden-trump-1-of-2 (discussed in #9).

[1.1.0] - 2020-10-21

• New event: Added Biden Trump 1 of 3, 2020-09-29, transcription on YouTube parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. (PR #8)

[1.0.0] - 2020-10-06

• Changed title of published fact: every fact title began with U.S. Presidential Debates - , removed in (955fd7f).
• Added detail: added a location field for all the debates (#7).
  • Except 1960-10-13, in which Nixon was in LA while Kennedy was in NYC.
  • Also added metadata for the VP debates, in preparation for adding them in the future.

[0.1.0] - 2020-09-29

• The initial version of the files in this repository were built in the presidential-debates folder of the mtdo repository.
• We will try to bring the history from that subfolder into this in the future.
• But for now, we're shipping our first public version, so we're calling it 1.0 and working from here.

Acknowledgements

• Transcript for Biden, Trump (1 of 2) from rev.
• Transcript for Biden, Trump (2 of 2) from rev.
• The Commission on Presidential Debates provides transcripts and metadata for the debates.
• C-SPAN provides video footage.
• CNN provided footage of the first debate of 2024.