I didn’t watch the last presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If you’d asked me then, I would have thought that debates had no point. After all, haven’t they outlived their original purpose? Back when the two major political parties were much closer in policy and mass media wasn’t quite as mass and literally in everyone’s pocket through their smartphones, I can see how having two people debate policies with each other on a stage could be very helpful to voters making up their minds.

But everyone’s mind is pretty much made up now. The two parties are so far apart in policy, and we are so plugged in and interconnected, that undecided voters, at least at a presidential level, are a critically endangered species. The question is less who you’ll vote for and more if you’ll bother to do it in the first place.

But then Biden’s debate performance was so bad that he ended his candidacy four months before the election, an action that is pretty much unprecedented in modern times. So while presidential debates might not be serving their original purpose, they clearly still matter.

I also think it’s important that politicians be put into situations that they cannot control. Every career politician wants interviews with friendly media where they know the questions in advance and won’t be pushed back. Being in a setting like a debate where they don’t know exactly what will be asked in advance, how their opponent will respond, or if the moderators will fact-check them shows how a potential president will respond in moments of improvisation.

I know that debates shouldn’t matter, that politics shouldn’t be entertainment and that we should all be focusing on policies, not personalities. But on the other hand, human beings are drawn toward other human beings, not toward bills and policy papers. We invented team sports for a reason. And as a nerd with a dad who studied political science instead of playing football, presidential debates are like my Super Bowl. I don’t watch any sports so just let me have this, OK? I grew up in a house of lawyers where politely arguing was a love language. I love debate. Besides, I admit, I kind of have a crush (krush?) on Kamala Harris. She’s a smart, accomplished brunette, which is exactly my type.

Speaking of smart brunettes, my fiancée Bo had not watched a presidential debate since 2004 and had zero interest in watching this one. But she’s an excellent partner so, in addition to sitting with me throughout the whole debate (even when the clock ticked past her bedtime), she brought me a cake. To celebrate. She gets 100 Partner Points and is well on the way to a gold medal.

I remember watching the debates in 2016, mostly. (I was drinking a lot of wine back then, so anything after the first 30 minutes would have been a little bit fuzzy.) I remember being so confident that we were going to have our first female president. I’d been told my whole life that smart, hardworking women can do anything, and up until Election Day in 2016, I’d never had a reason to doubt it. I’m older and wiser now, as it so happens.

It’s been a very long eight years for the country in general and me in particular. But Trump has also gotten older. (Not wiser, not by a long shot.) Trump in 2024 is an exhausted, rambling shadow of his former self. Back then, he could carry a thought, complete full sentences, even crack a joke or two. He was a natural showman and played to the crowds. I didn’t like anything he was saying back in 2016, but as a former theater kid I can recognize a good performer when I see one. But that guy is gone. The guy on the debate stage was tangential, distracted and spoke mostly in a monotone. Sad.

I can’t believe someone seriously running for president of the United States said “I have concepts of a plan” out loud on stage when asked about health care. That’s what I say to my fiancée when she asks what I want to wear to our wedding, not if I’m trying to be a leader of the free world. Or when the moderator told him that there had not, in fact, been credible reports of immigrants eating pet cats in Ohio and he said, “I saw it on TV.” For real? Most kids figure out the difference between television and real life by the time they’re in kindergarten.

After the debate finally finished, Bo turned to me and said, “I think I got stupider just watching that.” Perhaps someday in this country, we will be able to have policy debates again, where people exchange evidence-based ideas for America’s future. But not with Donald Trump on the stage.