Vice presidential debates have never moved the needle

Vice President Mike Pence and California Sen. Kamala Harris will face off on Wednesday for the first and only vice presidential debate during the 2020 campaign. But if history is any guide and people continue to vote the top of the ticket, the debate won't change much.

An analysis published by Gallup in 2012 declared that the median change following vice presidential debates in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2008 was 1 percentage point.

"None of the eight vice presidential debates occurring from 1976 to 2008 appears to have meaningfully altered voter preferences," analyst Andrew Dugan wrote at the time.

“There is very little evidence that vice presidential debates do much at all to alter the political landscape,” wrote University of Wisconsin professor Thomas Holbrook in his 1996 book, Do Campaigns Matter?