Carly Fiorina is making no secret of her unhappiness with the selection process that threatens to keep her off the main stage of the upcoming Republican debate, airing on CNN Sept. 16. But she’s directing her anger at the Republican National Committee, which didn’t actually set the standards that could keep her out.
Like the Aug. 6 Fox debate, the CNN debate will actually be two sessions: an earlier face off among the lower-ranked candidates, and a primetime debate with the top-ranked candidates. Fiorina was in the early debate on Fox, but her post-debate rise in the polls would appear to put her in the top group for the CNN debate. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls at the moment, Fiorina is seventh — ahead of Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, who all participated in the primetime debate on Fox. So Fiorina would appear to be in.
Except that CNN will use a system that includes polls going back two months before the Sept. 16 debate. “The first 10 candidates — ranked from highest to lowest in polling order from an average of all qualifying polls released between July 16 and September 10 … will be invited to participate” in the main debate, the network said in criteria released in May, when the debate was announced. The problem, for Fiorina, is that in those polls from July 16 to about Aug. 10, Fiorina was near the bottom. Then, of course, she took off after a well-received performance at the Fox debate. But if CNN includes those old polls with her at the bottom, she might not qualify for the main debate on Sept. 16.
It’s a CNN decision. (Fox also relied on polls, but ones that had been taken closer to debate time.) Rather than direct its fire at CNN, however, the Fiorina campaign is going after the RNC.
“Despite being solidly in the top 10 by every measure, the political establishment is still rigging the game to keep Carly off the main debate stage next month,” wrote Fiorina deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores in a statement Wednesday. “If the RNC won’t tell CNN to treat post-debate polling consistently with pre-debate polling, they are putting their thumb on the scale and choosing to favor candidates with higher polling for three weeks in July over candidates with measurable momentum in August and September.”
The RNC should tell CNN? Why doesn’t Fiorina take on CNN, which set the polling criteria? The thinking inside the Fiorina camp is that when the RNC limited the number of debates, and essentially forbade candidates from taking part in non-sanctioned debates, it gave enormous power to the networks staging the debates. In this case, CNN has used that power to create criteria that could keep Fiorina out. So Fiorina’s team believes the RNC could make a public statement to pressure CNN to change its standards to rely more on recent polls — a method that would allow Fiorina into the main debate. If the RNC doesn’t speak out, the thinking goes, then it is effectively taking sides against Fiorina.
But the RNC points out that deciding the standards for inclusion for the Sept. 16 debate has always been CNN’s job. “The RNC had great success creating a more orderly debate process but ultimately the criteria is legally left to the networks to determine,” the RNC said in a statement Wednesday. “CNN’s debate parameters were released in May in order ensure there was notice and awareness of the criteria well in advance of the debate.”
In its defense, CNN has noted many times that its standards were announced before Fiorina’s rise and do not target her in any way. The network also argues that Federal Election Commission guidelines prevent it from changing standards once those standards have been announced — a claim that may or may not be accurate.
But the bottom line is that Fiorina’s problem is with CNN, not the RNC. So why target the party instead of the network? Perhaps Fiorina believes the RNC is in fact controlling everything. Perhaps she believes it would not be a good idea to have a public feud with CNN, which, after all, will determine the questions she is asked on Sept. 16. Or perhaps she sees some benefit in using the debate as the basis for a voter-pleasing attack on the Republican establishment.
“It will be disappointing if Reince Priebus and the Republican establishment stand by and let a TV network keep Carly off the main stage … again,” wrote Isgur Flores. “It’s a simple question: Will we have a fair debate process or will the political establishment keep ignoring grassroots Republicans?”
