Profs and Pints DC presents: “Your Prep for the Vance-Walz Debate,” an overview of research on political persuasion followed by a debate watching party, with Ethan Porter, associate professor of political science and media and public affairs at George Washington University and author of two books on when and how political views change.
Presidential campaigns exert enormous effort and resources to change our political beliefs. They release ads, give speeches, and participate in debates such as the pending one between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. But what kind of voter persuasion actually works? Will anything that Vance and Walz say in debating each other alter the election’s outcome?
Come to DC’s Penn Social to hear such questions tackled in a pre-debate talk that will help you keep score and leave you much more attuned to what’s happening in your own mind and in the minds of others. The talk is an encore of an excellent presentation that Dr. Porter gave before the September 10th presidential debate, but tweaked slightly for the vice-presidential context.
The speaker, Professor Ethan Porter, is a scholar of political behavior whose research involves using randomized experiments to study how and why people do—or don’t—change their minds about politics. He directs the Misinformation/Disinformation Lab at GW's Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics and also the author of The Consumer Citizen, on how people approach political decisions as if buying products, and co-author of False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era. His work has been published extensively in scholarly journals and offers an evidence-based lens for understanding political decision-making.
Professor Porter will take us on a guided tour of what researchers have learned about political persuasion during elections. He’ll discuss what kind of persuasion actually occurs during presidential elections, what kinds of things change people’s minds, and what, precisely, people change their minds about.
You’ll learn how the power of persuasion has limits, especially in a time of intense polarization when voters already have deep attachments to their preferred parties and politicians before campaigns begin. Changing people’s minds about who they’ll vote for is incredibly hard, as only a small share of people flip from voting Democrat to voting Republican, or vice versa, from one presidential campaign to the next. What’s easier to change, and what’s most at play in debates, is not vote choice, but general feelings toward candidates, public knowledge of policy issues, and the perceptions of candidates held by elites.
The talk will end in plenty of time for you to grab another beverage to watch it on Penn Social’s big screens or get home to watch it on your own television. You’ll feel much better-equipped to evaluate not just the performances of the candidates, but also those of the pollsters and pundits who will be telling us what debate exchanges mattered. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Official Senate portrait of Vance. Photo of Walz by Gage Skidmore. Scale template from Canva.