On the night of May 6, 2026, seven candidates for California governor stood in front of a CNN audience and, by most accounts, failed the voters watching at home. What started as a structured policy discussion quickly descended into something else entirely. Katie Porter, one of the candidates, interrupted the bickering to tell her rivals: “I can’t believe the interrupting and name-calling and shouting and disrespect for everyone up here.” The moderators moved on. The attacks resumed.¹
It was, unfortunately, exactly what millions of Americans have come to expect.
For anyone who has been watching politics for the past 25 to 40 years, the instinct that something has gone badly wrong is not nostalgia or misremembering. It is correct. The data are clear, and they point in one direction: the decline in substantive, fact-based political debate is real, it has been building for decades, and it is now accelerating at every level of American political life, from the White House to city hall.
A Trend That Took Root in the 1980s
The first turning point most political historians identify is 1988. The Willie Horton advertisement, produced by a political action committee supporting George H.W. Bush, did not attack Michael Dukakis’s economic plan or his foreign policy vision. It attacked his character, using a Black convict’s face to stoke fear and racial anxiety among white voters. Political scientists later characterized it as a pivotal example of the “politics of hate” entering the mainstream of American electoral campaigns.²
That ad marked a turning point, not because negative campaigning was new, but because it demonstrated that a personal, fear-based attack could work. The lesson was absorbed quickly by both parties. Political consultant John Geer of Vanderbilt University documented a steady growth in the percentage of negative appeals in presidential television advertisements from 1960 through 2004, establishing that the trend predates social media and predates the era of intense partisan cable television.³
By the 2012 presidential campaign, three-quarters of all aired political ads appealed to anger, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which has tracked and analyzed television campaign advertising for decades.⁴ The 2016 campaign was even worse: 53 percent of ads were purely negative, compared to 48 percent in a comparable period in 2012.⁴ In 2024, the Wesleyan Media Project’s co-director Travis Ridout described the advertising environment plainly: “This has been an extremely negative campaign. The Trump campaign, and groups supporting him, have aired only a smattering of positive ads on television since April, barely perceptible amid the din of negative and contrast ads. That is unprecedented.”⁵
The Numbers Behind What Voters Are Feeling
The story of debate quality mirrors the story of political advertising. Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium conducted a quantitative content analysis of 4,102 speech acts in 24 televised debates over 35 years and found that incivility in debates is context-driven and erratic, not uniformly rising everywhere.⁶ But American data tell a different story.
A Pew Research study found that 84 percent of American adults say political debate has become less respectful over the last several years, and 78 percent say it has become less fact-based. Only 4 percent say it has become more respectful, and just 5 percent say it has become more fact-based. These findings held across every political and demographic group measured.⁷
Researchers studying presidential debate transcripts have documented that candidates increasingly “associate the opponent with a negative aspect,” make “unfavorable comparisons,” and question credibility rather than engage with policy substance. A corpus-based analysis of debate language from 1960 through 2020 found that impoliteness strategies were consistently deployed as attack tools, with instances in years when Donald Trump was a candidate diverging sharply from prior norms.⁸
A separate peer-reviewed analysis found that while candidates actually devoted substantially more debate time to policy discussions than to personal attacks, media coverage systematically emphasized “candidate conflicts and horse-race aspects of the campaign over policy content.” The study found that policy-related topics comprised 86 percent of candidate statements during debates, but only 39 percent of the news articles written about those same debates. Voters who relied on media coverage of debates, rather than watching them directly, absorbed an experience that was measurably more combative and less substantive than the actual event.⁹
The California Race as a Mirror
The California governor’s race in 2026 reflects this national pattern with unusual clarity. In two back-to-back debates, seven candidates chose to use their limited airtime chasing each other rather than addressing the issues Californians are living with. Front-runner Xavier Becerra faced a barrage of attacks about campaign finance irregularities, his management of unaccompanied immigrant minors at the Department of Health and Human Services, and shifting healthcare positions.¹
When a question about California’s sanctuary law was posed, candidates pivoted almost immediately into personal exchanges.¹⁰ The Sacramento Bee described the exchange as “combative,” the Los Angeles Times called it “fiery, at times ugly,” and CNN’s own coverage noted that candidates “moved aggressively to distinguish themselves” by targeting rivals rather than laying out competing visions for the state.¹⁰ ¹¹
This is not a California anomaly. It is a direct expression of a national incentive structure that rewards the attack.
June 2024 and the Stage That Said It All
The most vivid national illustration of the trend arrived in Atlanta on the night of June 27, 2024, when President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump met for their one and only debate of the election cycle. Biden called Trump a “convicted felon,” “a whiner,” and a man with “the morals of an alley cat.” Trump responded by claiming Biden “gets paid by China,” calling him “a Manchurian candidate,” and stating without evidence that Biden was “absolutely criminal.”¹²
Trump referenced Biden’s son Hunter’s legal troubles. Biden, his voice thin and wavering, struggled to maintain the thread of his own arguments. Trump, aiming for a more restrained demeanor than in his 2020 appearances, still centered many responses on misleading personal attacks that went unchallenged.¹² CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash attempted to maintain order, but the debate’s defining moments were not about housing costs or Social Security. They were about who could land a more damaging personal blow.¹³
The debate was watched by an enormous national audience precisely because Americans sensed it might generate something memorable. It did. But what they witnessed was not leadership or clarity of vision. It was exactly what decades of political research predicted it would be.
The Engine Driving the Decline
Understanding why this is happening requires looking at three reinforcing forces that did not exist, or existed in much weaker form, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Affective polarization has reached historic levels. In 1994, a majority of Republicans had unfavorable impressions of the Democratic Party, but only 17 percent had “very unfavorable” views. Among Democrats, only 16 percent held “very unfavorable” views of Republicans. By the time Pew Research conducted its landmark study in 2014, highly negative views had more than doubled, with 43 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats viewing the opposite party in strongly negative terms.¹⁴ Research published in Annual Reviews of Political Science confirmed that this trend is driven primarily by voters’ increasing dislike of the opposing party, not by increased affection for their own.¹⁵ The United States, according to a 2021 comparative analysis of twelve established democracies, “stands out for the pace of the long-term increase in affective polarization.”¹⁵
Social media has weaponized and accelerated incivility. A peer-reviewed study examining political incivility on social media found that uncivil tweets reliably receive more retweets and likes than civil ones, and that this differential has grown over time. The research identified a reinforcement learning dynamic: politicians who engage in personal attacks are algorithmically rewarded with more reach, which teaches them to escalate.¹⁶ An 11-year analysis of Reddit found that political communities are consistently more uncivil than non-political ones, and that surges in incivility track with offline political events.¹⁷ The 53 percent of Americans who report encountering incivility online or in person weekly or daily are not imagining a shift. They are accurately observing one.⁷
The donor and media ecosystem rewards outrage, not problem-solving. The Democratic Party’s platforms analyzed across 48 years showed that hostile references to Republicans in Democratic platforms quintupled between 1976 and 2024, cooperative language declined by more than half, and opposition-focused content rose from 15 percent to 40 percent of total platform content.¹⁸ The Republican Party’s rhetorical trajectory has followed a comparable arc. Both parties have been rewarded by their most engaged donors and most loyal media audiences for attack rather than governance.¹⁸
It Has Spread to Every Level
This is not exclusively a presidential phenomenon. The same pattern has colonized state and local politics, where the stakes are often more immediate and the forums more intimate.
The Brennan Center for Justice found that 40 percent of state and local officials are considering not running for re-election due to rising abuse and intimidation.¹⁹ Threats against members of Congress investigated by the U.S. Capitol Police reached 14,938 cases in 2025, a 58 percent jump from 9,474 cases in 2024, itself a record, representing the third consecutive year of increases.⁷ The National League of Cities documented 240 reported threat events across more than 40 states in 2024, a figure 60 percent higher than the same period in 2022.²⁰
A Washington Post story about a Takoma Park, Maryland, city council meeting in early 2026 illustrated how thoroughly this ethos has filtered down. A mayor’s attempt to maintain basic meeting decorum was met with shouting, profanity, and cries of “You’re not the dictator!” The question of whether citizens could clap at a local government meeting became, in a polarized America, a front in a larger culture war.²¹
CivicPulse surveys of more than 1,300 local officials found that approximately half report being verbally insulted, while roughly one in three report being harassed, and these numbers have remained at consistently elevated levels — not spiking briefly around a single event, but persisting as a new baseline.²²
What the Research Tells Us Is at Stake
Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their study of democratic erosion, identified the collapse of “mutual toleration” as one of the two primary mechanisms by which democracies fail. When opponents stop treating each other as legitimate rivals and start treating each other as existential enemies, the democratic norm of peaceful competition gives way to something far less stable.⁷
The United States has not reached that final stage. But the trajectory is measurable. Trust in the media has fallen to 28 percent, down from 40 percent five years ago.⁷ Congress passed 64 bills into law in 2025, down from roughly 900 per Congress in the early 1950s, a 93 percent decline in legislative capacity.²³ The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg found that the United States’ score on the Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24 percent within a single year, dropping the country’s global ranking from 20th to 51st place.²⁴
These are not simply cultural symptoms of a coarser age. They are structural consequences of a political system that has decided that defeating the opponent matters more than solving the problem.
What This Means for Americans Looking for Something Better
The Centercratic Party’s fifth principle is direct: conduct fact-based debates with respect, acknowledge genuine disagreements, and prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.²⁵ That principle exists not as a statement of preference for polite conversation, but as a recognition that democracy cannot function without it.
The Claremont McKenna College Civility Survey of 3,000 adults conducted in spring 2025 found that 53 percent of Americans describe society as uncivil, compared to just 26 percent who say it feels civil. More telling, 57 percent of respondents said they had held back honest opinions in the past year to avoid conflict, and 35 percent said they do not feel safe sharing their views on social media.⁷ When citizens begin self-censoring — not because the state has silenced them but because the political environment has made honesty feel dangerous — something important has been lost.
Forty-seven percent of independent voters — now the largest political group in America at 45 percent of the electorate — describe themselves as moderates who favor different parties on different issues. They are, by every measure, the voters most open to persuasion by facts and most likely to be driven away by personal attacks. They are precisely the Americans that substantive political debate is supposed to reach. And they are precisely the voters the current style of political combat has most thoroughly alienated.⁷ ²⁶
What happened in California’s governor debates is not a local story. It is a portrait of a national failure that has been building for four decades, reinforced at every level of government, and accelerated by the very technology that was supposed to make democracy more responsive. The voters watching from their living rooms know it when they see it. What remains to be seen is whether those seeking public office will care.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and Editor of The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Endnotes
Los Angeles Times. “Top takeaways from fiery, at times ugly, California governor debate.” May 5, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-05/top-takeaways-from-fiery-at-times-ugly-california-governor-debate
EBSCO Research Starters. “Willie Horton Incident.” https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/willie-horton-incident
Geer, John G. In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284996.html
Journalists’ Resource / Wesleyan Media Project. “Negative political ads and their effect on voters.” June 2022. https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/negative-political-ads-effects-voters-research-roundup/
Wesleyan Media Project. “More Than $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending This Cycle.” October 30, 2024. https://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/releases-103124/
University of Leuven. “Political Incivility in Televised Debates.” https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/648112
Centercratic Party / Center Voter. “Understanding Every Principle #5: Debate with Facts and Dignity.” Drawing on: Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Feelings About Politics, Polarization, and the Tone of Political Discourse,” September 19, 2023; Gallup, “Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.,” October 2025; Claremont McKenna College Dreier Roundtable, “The Civility Paradox: A National Survey of 3,000 U.S. Adults,” October 2025; U.S. Capitol Police, “Threats Against Congress Spiked in 2025,” January 27, 2026; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018. https://centervoter.com/p/understanding-every-principle-5-debate
Raei, Universidad de Alicante. “Face-work in North American Presidential Debates: A Corpus-based Analysis.” July 2024. https://raei.ua.es/article/view/27061/23694
Cambridge University Press. “Disappeared or Deleted? Media Coverage of Policy Content in Presidential Debates.” Political Science Research and Methods, 2026. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/9C4FB77F2E495267C143964FB3B0AFD9/S1468109925100169a.pdf/
Sacramento Bee. “Key takeaways from Tuesday’s California gubernatorial debate.” May 5, 2026. https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article315658283.html
CNN. “Key moments from CNN’s California governor primary debate.” May 5, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/05/politics/takeaways-cnn-california-governor-debate
Reuters. “Biden falters as Trump unleashes falsehoods during presidential debate.” June 28, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-trump-face-off-first-debate-with-age-fitness-focus-2024-06-27/
Scripps News. “Biden-Trump debate defined by major differences in policy, personal attacks.” June 27, 2024. https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/america-votes/biden-trump-debate-defined-by-major-differences-in-policy-personal-attacks
Pew Research Center. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” June 12, 2014. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., and Westwood, S.J. “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 129–146. See also: PMC. “Affective Polarization in Comparative and Longitudinal Perspective.” April 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10127533/
Bentivegna, Sara, and Rossella Rega. “Politicians Under Fire: Citizens’ Incivility Against Political Leaders on Social Media.” Social Media + Society, November 2024. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051241298415
Frontiers in Political Science. “Over-Time Trends in Incivility on Social Media: Evidence From Political, Non-Political, and Mixed Sub-Reddits Over Eleven Years.” November 1, 2021. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.741605/full
Chapman, Paul J. “The Democratic Party: From Bridges to Walls in 48 Years.” The Center Voter, January 30, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/the-democratic-party-from-bridges
Brennan Center for Justice. “Intimidation of State and Local Officeholders.” January 24, 2024. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/intimidation-state-and-local-officeholders
National League of Cities. “Promoting Community Civility to Reduce Local Political Violence.” August 14, 2024. https://www.nlc.org/article/2024/08/14/promoting-community-civility-to-reduce-local-political-violence/
The Washington Post. “Takoma Park Mayor Talisha Searcy Orders No Clapping at Council Meeting.” March 2026.
CivicPulse. “The Cost of Local Government Leadership.” November 29, 2023. https://www.civicpulse.org/post/the-cost-of-local-government-leadership
Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do to Fix It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america
Chapman, Paul J. “What’s the True Foundation of All Democracies?” The Center Voter, April 12, 2026. Drawing on: V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Democracy Report 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/whats-the-true-foundation-of-all
Centercratic Party. “Party Principles.” 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles
Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean