What did Utah lose after the Presidential debate was pulled?
Jun 27, 2024, 4:48 PM | Updated: 5:23 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — As the current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump take the stage in Atlanta for a historic, first-of-its-kind debate, Utah is mourning the loss of its scheduled Presidential debate for October.
The University of Utah was supposed to be the final stop for the highest-profile presidential debate of the political cycle. But the Presidential Debate Commission recently informed the university that none of the planned 2024 cycle debates would happen – making it official that the event scheduled for October 9 is canceled.
“The Biden-Harris Campaign informed the Commission that President Biden will not agree to debate under the sponsorship of the Commission during the 2024 general election campaign,” CDP Co-chairs Antonia Hernández and Frank Fahrenkopf said in a statement that the University posted on its website.
“It is unfair to ask the four campuses to continue to prepare for their debates, as they have been doing since their November 2023 selection.
We are grateful to the sites, and we are sorry to come to this decision,” the chairs said.
Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics who was tasked with organizing the event, said he too is disappointed.
“Of course we’re disappointed in that decision but it’s not in our control at all,” Perry said.
Perry said it cost $2.5 million to bid for the debate, money he said came from University of Utah revenue outside of student tuition or taxpayer money.
Perry said that the PDC will have to pay back the portion of that $2.5 million that they haven’t used, although he did not yet have a final accounting of how much that would be.
The Utah legislature also recently allocated an additional $2.5 million to be used for debate prep, but fearing that Trump would back out, the legislature put it in a fund that only gets spent with approval from the Executive Appropriations Committee. That never happened.
Money that has been spent, Perry said, was on hotels and some marketing costs.
“In terms of those high profile, big costs for fencing, etc., we negotiate all our contracts so we do not have those expenses,” he said.
Perry believed they have forged a good relationship with the Presidential Debate Commission and said that if anything falls through with these media debates, Utah is ready. But, he said he’s not hopeful it will happen this year.
“I don’t have really any hope that there’s going to be too many other debates than the two that are scheduled.”