For decades in American politics, underdogs have long spouted the cliche: “The only poll that matters is the one on election day.” This year, that’s not the case.
With up to 16 Republican candidates expected to run for the White House, television networks are struggling to find a way to adapt a conventional presidential debate to the wide field – after all, it’s tough to fit 16 different people on one stage, let alone give them all an opportunity to explain their policies to the American people in a 90-minute period.
Instead, television networks have decided to limit the field based on national polling. In the first debate, scheduled to be held by Fox News on 6 August in Cleveland, only those candidates in the top 10 in national polling will be allowed to participate.
The problem is that while this standard would currently include millionaire reality television star Donald Trump (due to make an announcement about his intentions on 16 June), it would exclude a number of other potential candidates who are taken more seriously by party elders.
This includes the only woman running, a three-term senator, and the man who finished second in the 2012 GOP presidential primary – and they’re not all terribly happy with the new rule. After all, if you don’t make the debates, you don’t get on television and if you don’t get on television, no one takes your campaign seriously.
Carly Fiorina has perhaps the most positive outlook on the new rules. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO told the Guardian in an interview on Saturday: “I am glad to know the goal. I will work hard to meet the goal and I will be on the debate stage.” However, Fiorina is the only woman running for the GOP nomination in an election where the Democratic frontrunner is Hillary Clinton, and a number of Republicans have worried about how it would look to exclude her from the stage.
In a gaggle with reporters on Friday after an event in West Des Moines, Iowa, Lindsey Graham expressed stronger concerns. The three-term senator from South Carolina acknowledged “having a debate with 16 people might be problematic”, but said he worried that “the current standard rewards celebrity and people who have run before” and noted that “if Brad Pitt got into the GOP primary, he’d be in the debate”.
Instead, Graham suggested focusing the polling threshold on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where all the candidates are campaigning ahead of the primaries and caucuses there at the beginning of next year. He pointed out: “None of us is campaigning in California.” (It’s worth noting that since Graham is from South Carolina, his preferred criteria would give him a significant advantage.)
Perhaps the most upset is Rick Santorum. The former Pennsylvania senator’s displeasure with the debate rules is unsurprising. In 2012, he won 11 states and came just short of pulling off a remarkable upset against Mitt Romney. Three years later, he may be excluded from a presidential debate while the host of Celebrity Apprentice is allowed on stage.
In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Santorum simply suggested having two different debates and dividing the GOP field up into “tranches of eight”. Santorum pointed out that the race was still “a very fluid thing” and that no candidate had yet gone significantly over 10% in the polls.
Yet they all will have to potentially face the reaper when the first debate comes. Although Fox has promised to give candidates who don’t make the cut some opportunity to appear, that won’t be the same as actually participating and it will instantly relegate those who don’t make the cut into a second tier, even if the difference between 10th place and 11th place is a mere percentage point.
The problem for these candidates, is that, like the Democrats, the GOP has imposed an exclusivity rule for participants in party-sanctioned debates this year. Candidates must pledge only to participate in debates sponsored by the Republican. If they appear in alternate, unsanctioned debates, they are excluded from all future debates sanctioned by the Republican Party.
The result is that those candidates who don’t hit the threshold are in a catch-22 situation if they wish to appear in future debates. If they seek alternate venues, they can’t appear in any party-sanctioned debates in the future. But if they don’t do so, the lack of national publicity will likely keep them from hitting the threshold needed to participate in the future.
In the meantime, candidates on the chopping block need to do what they can to make the cut. And, for them the problem is that regardless of their careers in public service or the number of bills they’ve passed, unlike Donald Trump, they have never appeared on reality television.
