knowledgeable about issues and capable of sound judgment, and trustworthy.  But whatever your own purposes in watching the debates, you should try to clarify them in your own mind now.  And you should view the debates through an interpretive lens shaped by your own purposes.  There are many other voices telling us how to watch the debates - to try to figure out who "won," for instance, or who will get the biggest bump in the next poll, or who made the biggest gaffe, etc. - and if we are not careful, we can start watching the debates from the interpretive frames defined by those voices.  So it is important to know our own purposes first.

2. Prepare for the debate ahead of time.  Read up on the issues.  Find out what you can about the candidates' major proposals. Candidate websites and brochures are helpful, but non-partisan sources often provide more complete, more objective, and more balanced information.  The more you know about the issues and proposals, the better able you will be to evaluate the worth of candidate answers in relation to your own views and concerns.  After the debate, use the debates as a springboard to further, and perhaps more focused, research.  Read more about the issues and proposals that "spoke to you" during the debate.  Make certain that those things important to you that were represented as facts are, in fact, facts (websites such as factcheck.org can be extremely useful in the process).

3. Set aside your party and candidate biases - at least during the debate.  Granted, we can never do this completely, but it is important to approach the debates with an open, yet informed and critical, mind.  If we allow our biases and partisan allegiances to guide our viewing, then we may pre-judge answers and hear only what we already expected to hear, regardless of what might actually have been said.  

4. Hear the debate through your own ears. We might be told ahead of time that the polls say X is an important issue, a `swing' issue, and we should pay attention to X, or that candidate Y must address issue X because s/he is perceived as weak on it, or any number of other things.  What happens in the debate, we are told, should be evaluated on the basis of those concerns.  But once we have set aside our own biases, there is no point in viewing the debate through the biases, or expectations, of others, so let your own purposes shape how you evaluate the candidates.

5. Analyze the claims that candidates are making. Claims are the end-points of arguments:  what should be done, what should be believed, or what should be taken as a fact.  It is important to recognize the claims made, and then to examine the bases on which each claim was advanced.  Did the candidates offer sufficient justification for believing the claim?  One good question to ask is, is the claim controversial?  Many times they are not:  who is not for freedom, peace, prosperity, or quality medical care?  Often, then, the important claims to examine are not the goals themselves but rather the ideas offered as ways of moving toward the goals.  

6. Analyze the evidence and reasoning that the candidates use. When you ask whether sufficient justification was offered for you to accept the claim advanced, you are in essence asking about the evidence and reasoning offered to support the claim.  What is the evidence?  If statistics or studies, who produced them?  Is there reason to believe the research is solid?  Were the researchers biased?  If examples are offered, then are the examples fairly typical?  Or are they the exceptions?  Be prepared for examples with strong emotional appeals, especially on topics such as the war and health care.  Strong emotional reactions can sometimes cloud our judgment; at other times, they may augment our judgment.  The trick is to try to discern when the emotional appeal is designed to overwhelm our other sensibilities.  What were the reasons?  Were they relevant to the claim?  Was the reasoning process sound?  Does the reasoning lead directly from the evidence to the claim advanced?

7. Listen carefully to candidate answers; listen casually to moderator questions.  Some of the questions asked during the debates may directly solicit answers or insights that you seek, but many may not.  Some questions may suite better the purposes of the media (e.g., hyping ratings, or even notoriety, by "picking a fight") but may not be the kinds of questions to offer you the insights or information you need.  Keep your own questions in mind, and listen for relevant answers at any point in the debate.  Don't wait for the moderator to ask "your question(s)."

8. Don't be duped by diversionary tactics. This is a double-edged tip.  If the moderator has posed a question to which you really want a clear and developed answer, diversionary tactics are a means of distraction.  However, what may be a diversion from one question may well provide the answer to other questions, and perhaps the ones that you are listening for.  Don't assume that the moderator will ask the "right" questions, but even so the candidates may still provide you with the "right" answers.  So what are some of these diversionary tactics?  The most infamous is the ad hominem, which is when a respondent "attacks" the questioner (in this case either the moderator or, by extension, another candidate), as in "well, I might have expected such a question from someone who voted 49 times to raise taxes on homeless widows."  Other diversionary tactics include dismissal ("yes, but what is really important that we should talk about is..."), digression ("that reminds me that I wanted to respond earlier to..."), or obfuscation ("I have always supported that concept except under exigent circumstances which rendered that concept inoperable.").  There are many others, but the simple test is relevance:  is the answer relevant to the question?  And if not, you then need also to decide if the question itself was relevant to your purposes.

9. See the debate through your own eyes. If you watch the debates on television, then you are at the visual editing mercy of television.  Try not to let `candid' shots of one candidate distract you from another's answer; do not let different camera angles that might make a candidate look larger (e.g., an upshot) or smaller, for instance, affect your evaluation of that candidate. Try to discount the effects of such variations.  Be wary of scrolled summaries of the question posed; they may not represent it well.  Try not to be distracted or influenced by `news bulletins' scrolling beneath a screen.  

10. Remember why you watched the debate. Remember the purposes you had in watching the debate.  The issues about which you had questions or concerns?  Did you learn anything about them?  If you gained a better understanding of which candidate might best represent you, if you have gained a clearer, more informed basis for making your judgment about the candidates, then you have won from the debates.   And we have all won from the debates because as voters we are not here to "pick the winner" but rather, through the sum of our collective judgments as expressed by our ballots, to pick who wins.