5 Topics the Presidential Candidates Should Debate Tonight

Who’ll get in the best zinger? Will Trump combust over crowd-size claims? Will Harris’ polarizing laugh punctuate the proceedings at Tuesday night’s presidential candidates’ debate?

Whether we like it or not (or engage in it ourselves), discussion of the face-off at water coolers, around dinner tables and on TV news sets seems as likely to focus on trivialities as true issues.

Maryland Today asked several faculty members to imagine a looking-glass world in which pundits and viewers alike cared more about the substance of proposals for creating a better nation and world than they did about style, or how smoothly candidates deliver scripted lines. Here’s what they said they’d like to see Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tackle in the debate.

Affordable Housing
Discussions about housing affordability often get buried in a larger conversation around inflation, said real estate development Associate Professor Jesse Saginor. “People see the daily impacts of inflation when they go to the grocery store or get their electric bill, but home purchases aren’t something people encounter with any frequency.”

Yet it’s a pressing election issue this year: In 2013, half of all U.S. homes on the market were considered affordable using the standard 30% of salary ratio; by 2023, that number had plummeted to 16%. The picture is bleak for renters, too. A quarter of them are spending more than 50% of their income on rent. Saginor said that while the cost of housing has continued to increase in the United States, people’s salaries have not kept pace.

Harris is promising to build 3 million affordable units in four years and to provide 4 million first-time homebuyers with $25,000 in assistance, while Trump would stop undocumented immigrants from securing mortgages. But beyond broad ideas, neither has spoken in much detail about the proposals or how they'd move them toward reality—something the candidates could rectify in the debate, said Saginor.

“The devil’s in the details,” he said. “This is a very complex issue. While these aren’t necessarily lofty ambitions, there are a lot of hurdles to clear to make them a reality.”

Gun Violence Prevention
The candidates should offer serious visions about how to end an ongoing plague that killed nearly 43,000 Americans last year, and that means going beyond posturing, said Joseph B. Richardson, MPower Professor of African American Studies, Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology, who studies the effects of urban violence on young Black men.

In particular, he wants to find out if Harris and Trump will commit to supporting funding for community violence intervention (CVI) programs that seek to stop shootings before they occur or to defuse incidents without involving police.

“To my knowledge, former President Trump has never talked about or offered support for CVI, so I’d like to hear from him on that,” he said. “And I’d like to hear from Vice President Harris about the sustainability of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which she has overseen.

“We’ve been able to work closely with them, but ARPA (American Recovery Plan Act) funding for that is running out. Is there a way to sustain federal dollars to support CVI? That office has been instrumental for our work, and serves as a model for other offices like it in Maryland and elsewhere.”’

Reproductive, Maternal and Infant Health Care
Marie Thoma, associate professor of family science, hopes to hear both candidates reiterate their stances in relation to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade: “Given that context, I would want to know, what are family-friendly policies they might support?

“For example, we’re the only high-income country without paid family leave. During the pandemic, women were more likely to leave the workforce to care for young children. We are seeing these same impacts with the rising cost of child care for families. How can we address that and increase public investment in child care and its workforce?”

A positive but uneven development is the expansion of Medicaid coverage for pregnant women, which some states are extending to a year after childbirth, rather than the standard two months. It would be better to have nationwide rather than piecemeal change, Thoma said.

Thoma further wants to know if candidates will continue initiatives from the current administration, such as the White House’s “Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis” and the recent U.S. surgeon general’s report “Parents Under Pressure” on parental mental health and well-being.

Climate Change
As an atmospheric scientist, Tim Canty said he’d appreciate a baseline acknowledgement from the candidates of what climate data is revealing about rapid global changes.

But that’s just a start, said the associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic science, who’s overseeing a new effort to provide early warning of floods as one of the leaders of the Climate Resilience Network, an effort funded by a UMD Grand Challenges Institutional Grant.

“I’d also like to hear some discussion of comprehensive policy on how the federal government can support state governments in their efforts to build climate-resilient states and communities,” he said. “You can address this from different perspectives, but I’ll go with the money argument: These changes are putting billions, if not trillions, of dollars of our economy at risk.

“I’m a scientist, but I also live here, and I want us to be protected, whether that’s adaptation to sea level rise or mitigating climate change from getting worse, or maybe even reversing it,” Canty said. “That’s what I wish they’d talk about, rather than dickering over whether it’s real.”

Immigration
Madeline Hsu, a history professor and director of the Center for Global Migration Studies, said immigration policy is the most direct way the federal government can shape the United States’ population, so the stakes here are high.

While some Americans embrace globalization and others prefer more protectionist policies, it’s important to have “disagreements without taking the step of demonizing migrants who come,” said Hsu. “They want to have better opportunities for themselves, for their families especially. And often it’s driven by desperation, because they can’t stay where they are.”

She hopes the candidates will stick to data, rather than political talking points, because “the economic well-being of the United States requires immigration,” such as the farm laborers who worked through the pandemic. One area rife with misinformation is rhetoric around refugees, who Hsu noted have a legal right to make asylum claims since the U.S. signed onto the 1967 United Nations protocol.

In addition, “migration that comes from the U.S.’s close neighbors—like the Caribbean and Latin America—is inherently going to be at greater numbers than migration from anywhere else. We should be thinking about our immigration policy and acknowledge this difference, because the current system has this ceiling applied equally to countries around the world."

Chris Carroll, Karen Shih and Maggie Haslam contributed to this article.