another sentence about the budget before pausing again, with her hands clasped, to take a deep breath. She was wordless for 13 seconds, looking down at her hands and letting out a sigh-like giggle, a smile growing across her face. At last, she looked at the moderator and reboarded her train of thought. “We have,” she said, taking another brief pause, “um, did what was right for Arizona.” Brewer ultimately finished her minute-long opening statement, touting her accomplishments in passing the state’s infamous Senate Bill 1070 and her efforts pushing back against the federal government, but the moment lives in political infamy. “I honestly thought that she had some kind of health issue,” Goddard recalled in a recent conversation with New Times. “And that maybe a Heimlich maneuver was what needed to be done.” Political consultant Chuck Coughlin, then Brewer’s campaign manager, attributed her freeze-up to Brewer listening a little too intently to the other candidates, which left her unpre- pared when it was her turn. In the aftermath, Brewer decided she had little to gain — and potentially a lot to lose — by participating in another debate. “(Debates are) not her strength,” Coughlin told New Times. “You have to understand who you’re dealing with and what their skill sets are. And then you’ve got to prep them for that.” Brewer declined to debate Goddard a second time, and faced criticism for avoiding him. But, perhaps proving the wisdom of avoiding a debate, she drubbed Goddard by more than 200,000 votes and remained in office. In 1998, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Paul Johnson blasted Republican Gov. Jane Hull for not agreeing to a larger slate of debates. As is often the case with the debate debate, the actions of both sides were informed by political calculus. Johnson, now 67 and the chair of the Arizona No Labels Party, admitted to New Times that he pushed for the slate “probably because I was behind in the polls” — after the first debate, his campaign’s early internal polling showed his support jumped from 20% to 40%. Hull’s campaign didn’t want to debate anymore, arguing that she was also too busy acting as the state’s governor. A popular incumbent, Hull was so far ahead of Johnson that she didn’t need to stoop to debating him. “That’s a classic strategy if you are far ahead,” the pollster told the Arizona Republic at the time. “It makes it literally impossible for the compe- tition to get any publicity.” Johnson lost to Hull in a landslide. It’s old hat for candidates to decline debates, and for their rivals to claim they’re scared. In 1974, former Phoenix Mayor John Druggs passed on debating one of his primary opponents, Milt Graham, arguing that there were more people in the race. In a 1986 contest to take over Barry Goldwater’s seat in the U.S. Senate, Democratic candidate Richard Kimball accused Republican John McCain of refusing to debate him. In 1994, incumbent Gov. Fife Symington was criticized for not attending a debate hosted by a youth crisis shelter in Tucson. He cited a conflict. And sometimes, especially when an incumbent is in the race, a candidate is actually too busy. In 2002, Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano was criticized for skip- ping a candidate forum hosted by a Spanish-language radio station. Mario Diaz, her campaign manager at the time, attributed the absence to a previous commitment. Speaking to New Times recently, Diaz said Napolitano’s campaign would receive many debate invitations from special interest groups but that preparing for them was “laborious.” You can’t accept every invitation. “You’re going to get criticized for any decision one makes, but as a campaign manager, we have to make those tough calls,” Diaz said. “I wouldn’t run the campaign based on what other people are saying. It’s just about what’s best for my candidate.” In 2022, that seemed to be the strategy for Hobbs, an uneasy public speaker whose opponent was a tremendous bullshit machine that no debate format could hope to contain. That avoidance couldn’t have hurt her too much, given that Hobbs went on to win, albeit narrowly. But it did break with a tradition of at least one gubernato- rial debate each cycle going back at least 70 years. That debate-less win raised another question: Do these debates even matter? But that was a presidential debate, which was watched by tens of millions of people. For debates at lower levels of government — even with important offices like governor up for grabs — the effect on a campaign is arguable. Rarely is a debate the deciding factor in who wins or loses. One argument for participating in debates has nothing to do with whether they help, hurt or move the political needle at all. Candidates should debate, Goddard says, because it’s the democratic thing to do. “I remember considering it to be pretty much as much of a requirement as filling out the form to say you’re a candidate,” Goddard said. “You didn’t duck debates, because for however much they tend to be abused with stunts and with trying to get sound bites out of your opponent, they’re the one chance the public gets to see you outside of the advertising medium. And I think that’s critically important.” Chris Cumminskey, a former state lawmaker and secretary of state candi- date who pushed for the passage of the Clean Elections Act in 1998, agreed. Debates are often the only time voters see all the major candidates “on the same stage,” he said, “and you can kind of do a compare and contrast.” Former candi- dates and political consultants also point to debates as the only opportunities for the public to witness candidates discuss important issues in an open forum rather than in television ads, campaign mailers or at political rallies. In a debate, you can’t hide behind money or a campaign manager. “Nothing is a perfect forum,” Goddard said. “But when everything else that you see is some kind of structured advertisement, it makes the debate even more important.” Well, maybe. Research says that polit- ical debates have some effect on voter knowledge, but that effect isn’t large. A 2013 University of Missouri study found that voters find debates most useful when one candidate is “relatively unknown,” many voters are undecided, the race is close and party allegiances are weak. Even under those conditions, voters use debates to gauge candidates’ personalities and character rather than their policy positions, which are often wonky and difficult to distill into 90-second sound bites. Still, the study also found that voters’ “democratic attitudes and behaviors” are positively affected when they tune in to debates, which heighten a viewer’s interest in the ongoing campaign and encourage voters to “seek out additional campaign information following their debate viewing.” A 2020 study in the Journal for Political Economy found that watching debates led to voters gaining higher political knowledge, including awareness of candidate policy stances and improved “alignment” between voter policy preferences and those of their elected candidate. But do debates sway people? Not really. The University of Missouri study also showed that general election debates have very little effect on voter choice. More than 86% of voters don’t change their candidate preference following a debate. Debates lead undecided voters to choose a candidate only 7% of the time, and only 3.5% of debate-watchers switched from one candidate to the other. And that’s people who watched the debates. Not many do. Take the guberna- torial debate in the GOP primary this year, arguably the highest-profile race on any primary ballot. While over-the-air viewership numbers are hard to come by, the YouTube view counts of the 32 news organizations that streamed the debate totaled roughly 28,000. For comparison, more than 603,000 voters turned out during this year’s GOP primary for governor, when Biggs bested Rep. David Schweikert by more than 359,000 votes. If you’re a front-running candidate, what is there to gain by debating? Campaigns don’t feel like “there’s a downside to skipping” debates, Cumminsky said, because the public doesn’t demand them anymore. There’s more risk than upside — a gaffe winds up in your opponents’ ads while your minute-long soliloquy on water scarcity is forgotten almost as quickly as the words came out of your mouth. “The risk in participating in these debates is that you can’t control some of the things that happen,” Cumminsky said. “And if you’re ahead, you don’t want to make a mistake.” The influx of money in politics has afforded candidates much more efficient — and controllable — ways of getting their political message across. In 2014, the total spending in Arizona’s guberna- torial race amounted to less than $20 million. This cycle, Hobbs and Biggs have combined to raise more than $14.5 million, and the general election is more than three months away. Those war chests allow candidates to carefully curate their political image Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer appears on stage before a debate sponsored by CNN and the Republican Party of Arizona at the Mesa Arts Center between 2012 Republican presidential candidates. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Left to right: Joseph Chaplik, Jay Feely and John Trobough squared off at a GOP debate in the race for Congressional District 1 on June 24, 2026. (Diannie Chavez/Arizona Republic – Pool) >> p 12
