Tickets won’t be available for the presidential debate at the National Constitution Center
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will debate next week in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center in an event hosted by ABC News, the network announced last month.
It will all go down Tuesday at 9 p.m., and will be aired live on ABC, ABC News Live, Disney+, and Hulu. World News Tonight managing editor and anchor David Muir and World News Tonight Sunday anchor Linsey Davis will moderate.
Unfortunately for folks who would like to attend, the debate will be presented without a live audience, ABC has announced.
The debate not having a live audience is part of a set of rules Harris and Trump agreed to this week. Additional rules include candidates being allocated two-minute answers to questions; two minutes for rebuttals; and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications, and responses. Trump and Harris will not be able to ask questions of one another, and their microphones will be muted when they are not speaking.
The lack of an audience is not unique this election season. When Trump and President Joe Biden debated in Atlanta in June on CNN, there was no in-person audience, marking the first presidential debate without one since 1960, the New York Times reported, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon participated in the first televised debates.
Biden’s shaky performance at the June debate was highly criticized, and ultimately contributed to his decision to drop out of the presidential race last month. On the same day Biden announced he would not seek reelection, he endorsed Harris for the Democratic nominee, and she formally secured the nomination last month.
The National Constitution Center, meanwhile, has hosted similar high-profile events in the past. In 2008, it hosted the Democratic primary debate between then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and also served as the location of ABC News Town Halls for Trump and Biden in 2020.
“We are honored to be selected,” the National Constitution Center’s President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen said in a statement last month. “The National Constitution Center’s mission is to model civil dialogue … Presidential debates are a meaningful opportunity for all Americans to learn more about the principles that define American democracy.”