US Election 2020 - Presidential Debates

Context

The US 2020 election sees the incumbent Republican president Donald Trump facing off against his Democrat challenger Joe Biden. Both candidates agreed to debate their political stances in the lead-up to the vote on November 3rd.

The 1st debate took place on September 29th at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. It was moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. The vice-presidential debate between VP Mike Pence and California Senator Kamala Harris took place on October 7th at Kingsbury Hall, Salt Lake City, UT. It was moderated by USA Today's Susan Page.

After Donald Trump tested positive for Covid-19 after his first debate and subsequently recovered, the 2nd presidential debate was initially converted into a virtual event. However, Trump declined to participate in a virtual debate and the event was transformed into a (socially distanced) town hall with Joe Biden alone. This event was moderated by George Stephanopoulos on the ABC network and took place on October 15th. Donald Trump then decided to hold a town hall of his own, which took place at the same day and time as the Biden town hall and was aired on NBC. This event was moderated by Savannah Guthrie.

The actual 2nd, and final, presidential debate between Biden and Trump took place on October 22nd at Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee and was moderated by NBC News' Kristen Welker. This debate implemented stricter conditions on the candidates' speaking times to limit the frequent interruptions that had characterised the 1st debate.

Content

This dataset provides the full debate audio recordings as well as the corresponding transcripts in unstructured text form and cleaned csv shape.

Acknowledgements

Transcripts were downloaded from https://www.rev.com. The audio files were extracted from Youtube. Banner photo by visuals on Unsplash.