The Democratic National Committee has plenty of incentive to shrink the 20-person presidential candidate field likely to appear in the first two intra-party clashes, in June and July.
A smaller candidate group could lead to a quicker nomination process and allow the eventual winner to concentrate on the fall 2020 fight against President Trump. Party officials also likely aren’t eager for rounds of negative campaigning among Democratic candidates, with toxic opposition research that could come back to haunt the nominee in the general election.
The DNC upset some White House hopefuls last week in announcing a series planned for later in the year with more stringent polling and fundraising criteria than the first two events, set for July 26 to 27 in Miami and July 30 to 31 in Detroit. Those debates, capped at 20 participants overall, require 1% or more support in three polls and 65,000 unique donors.
For the later gatherings, though, contenders will need 2% or more approval and 130,000 contributors.
Matthew Green, a Catholic University of America politics professor, said he agreed with the DNC’s general objective of “weeding” out the current bulky group of candidates, which runs from bold-faced names such as former Vice President Joe Biden to lesser-known candidates such as entrepreneur Andrew Yang. But he urged the party to exercise caution when tinkering with the debate format.
“If you have enough donors and are popular, it takes away the party’s ability to conduct quality control. It gives someone who can generate enough media play the ability to assert themselves in the debate process like Trump did when he, for lack of a better term, hijacked the Republican Party,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I’m not saying that’s going to happen here, but there’s uncertainty in the process.”
Debates during the 2016 GOP primary, which featured 17 major contenders, disintegrated into “pontification” rather than being a conversation, Green said, leaving Trump’s “bold, controversial” candidacy “standing out.”
Peter Fenn, a Democratic strategist and owner of Fenn Communications Group, whose experience in party politics goes back to the 1970s, said the DNC was “smart” to up the threshold for debate inclusion. An unwieldy field of two dozen prospects could weaken the party and the nominee eventually selected to challenge Trump in 2020.
“Democrats are chafing at the bit for change and wanting to defeat Trump, and there are a lot of people intent on being part of it,” Fenn told the Washington Examiner. “The concern is that it gets to be quite a zoo if you have continuous debates with large numbers of people only getting between six to eight minutes over the course of a couple of hours. It makes it hard for them to make their point, and you want eyeballs on these debates.”
Keeping attention of fickle television viewers, and prospective primary and caucus voters, is key, Fenn added. “If the Democrats have 20 candidates in debates until Iowa, spread over two nights, I wonder if voters will be greeting them with a big, loud yawn.”
But the risk of not appearing on stage appears to have left some hopefuls concerned.
Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, among others, have sent out several fundraising emails about the DNC’s decree.
“We’ll be honest, that’s an incredibly high bar for anybody to meet. So in this race, a handful of frontrunners — many of whom came into this race with huge fundraising advantages — are essentially already qualified under the new rule,” Booker’s team wrote in an email sent multiple times to the candidate’s database. “The new DNC rule is a direct test for our campaign — whether we pass it and secure Cory’s spot on stage is up to people like you.”
Klobuchar was slightly more measured.
“I won’t sugarcoat it — we quickly qualified for the first set of debates, but we have to meet the challenge of this new goal and the sooner the better,” she wrote. “I don’t have a political machine, I don’t come from money and I’ve spent the last couple of years helping other Democrats get elected — not laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign. Compared to some of the other 2020 candidates, that puts us at a disadvantage.”
Former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who has yet to satisfy the criteria for the first debates, has slammed the standards and asked the DNC to disclose how they “were determined.” And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who likewise is running out of time to rack up 65,000 donors to participate in the June and July debates, are focusing on fundraising.
“I’m getting close to having the 65,000 donors I need to get it done,” Gillibrand wrote this week, referring to her work on advocating for women’s issues. “But we have just 8 days left to close the gap before we have to submit numbers to the DNC, and the debate stage is where I can make the strongest case for my campaign.”
