As the first Republican presidential primary debate grows closer, critics of the Fox News debate format have only grown louder. The candidates likely to be cut out of the main debate are complaining that the format isn’t inclusive enough. Others complain that the margin of error is too wide to accurately distinguish among candidates on the bubble. More critics say that using national polls to determine who the strongest candidates are unduly rewards name recognition.
To amend a famous Winston Churchill quote, the Fox format is the worst debate format, except for all the others that have been proposed.
Some have said that all 17 candidates should be included in the debate. But including every candidate would give each one enough time to answer only a couple questions during the two-hour debate. As this is the first debate, candidates will probably take some time to introduce themselves and their background stories to the audience, leaving little time for substantive policy debates.
Some critics counter that there are 17 viable candidates — including multi-term governors of large states and high-profile ex-senator — and that each one deserves a chance to be heard. But there really aren’t 17 viable candidates. Why should Rick Santorum, whose nomination prospects can charitably be described as implausible, get the same amount of air time as Scott Walker or Jeb Bush? Long-shot candidates don’t deserve to share a stage with the tier of frontrunners.
The Fox format rewards those candidates who have done the early work to gain support. They’ve already been raising substantial sums of money and gaining endorsements from influential Republicans. The candidates who are doing well in the polls now deserve to have more airtime for their hard work and early success.
Uninformed voters who may not be acquainted with the candidates need a way to separate the frontrunners from the underdogs. Cutting out low-polling candidates shows uninformed voters which candidates have a real shot at winning the nomination, and allows them to focus their attention on those candidates.
National polls this early in the process do not accurately indicate who will win the nomination, but they do show fairly well who will not.
Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, is probably not going to win the nomination or any primary. Sen. Lindsey Graham might make noise in his home state of South Carolina, but with less than 1 percent of support nationwide, it is highly unlikely that he will win the nomination. It’s similarly unlikely that former Sen. Santorum will repeated his 2012 upset victory in the Iowa Caucus. George Pataki might have been an interesting candidate eight or more years ago, but most Republicans have moved on from him.
Fox is being generous by giving these and other long-shot candidates airtime from 5-6 p.m. on Thursday. Initially, Fox was going to require candidates to average 1 percent or more in the polls to make the consolation stage, but Fox lowered the bar to be even more inclusive.
Fox could have been more transparent from the start about which polls it would include in its average, as well as which methodologies those polls would utilize. Instead, it is keeping that a secret until 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Regardless of which candidates end up in which debate, both the frontrunners and underdogs will get their chance to speak to voters. One recommendation to improve future debates would be to lower the cutoff even more, to six or eight candidates, to further separate viable candidates from long-shots.
