When eight Republican presidential candidates gathered to debate in Tampa Monday night, a ninth hopeful, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, was at his home in Santa Fe. The cast of the Florida debate ranged from the front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who sometimes registers just 1 percent support in the polls. But since Johnson has also received 1 or even 2 percent support in some polls, he couldn’t help wondering: Why are they on stage, and I’m at home?
“It’s terribly, terribly frustrating,” Johnson told me by phone from New Mexico. “Without pointing a finger at Jon Huntsman, I think it’s so arbitrary.”
Here’s Johnson’s dilemma: The networks staging the debates (in this case CNN) require that a candidate reach a certain level of support in the polls to be included on stage. But most pollsters aren’t asking the public about Johnson, so he’s not showing up in the polls. No polls means no debates.
CNN’s rules for the Tampa faceoff required that all candidates have an average of at least 2 percent support in at least three polls conducted in August (the criteria named the specific polls). Johnson points out that he received 2 percent support in a CNN poll conducted Aug. 24-25, as opposed to 1 percent each for Huntsman and former Sen. Rick Santorum.
But that alone didn’t lift Johnson over the threshold. To make it would have required Johnson to score 2 percent or better in at least two other polls. But he was not included at all in the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll or the Wall Street Journal-NBC News. Why? For a mixture of objective and subjective reasons.
Jon Cohen, who runs the Post’s polling, says Johnson got nearly zero support earlier this year in some open-ended polling that asked respondents to name the candidate they supported (rather than asking them to choose from a pre-selected list of candidates). The decision not to include Johnson in recent polls was “based on what we’ve learned from open-ended questions and also on our reporting on how serious the campaigns are,” says Cohen. “It’s not only a numbers decision.”
Huntsman had more support a few months ago than he does now, and he did show up in the Post’s early open-ended polling. The Post also takes into account Huntsman’s big-league campaign, with its fundraising and staffers and consultants and candidate travel — a juggernaut compared to Johnson’s bare-bones effort. So Huntsman is in. In the most recent Post poll, he received 1 percent support.
Johnson was also not included in the Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey. Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who is co-conductor of the poll, says it’s a “difficult issue” to decide whose name ends up on the survey. McInturff says he tries not to include more than eight names; any more is too hard to follow in a telephone survey. He also looks to see whether “the evidence suggests a candidate would test above the margin of error.” Johnson didn’t make the cut.
Add it all up and Johnson, along with other candidates like Buddy Roemer and Thaddeus McCotter, was not in Tampa. It’s getting to be an old story. Recent debates on Fox News (one of which I participated in as a panelist) and on MSNBC have also set standards for admission that did not include him.
“This is all Catch-22,” says Johnson. “You have to be in the debates to garner attention to raise support to raise money.” He’s now fighting a vicious cycle: no polls, no debates, no attention, no support, no money.
But the debate issue is not just about Johnson. It’s also about Huntsman. The former Utah governor has a real campaign and has gotten some glowing press, but if he continues to sputter in the polls, he might fall below the networks’ pre-set standards. Just because Huntsman seems like a top-tier candidate doesn’t mean he will become one. Or even a middle- or lower-tier candidate.
Huntsman currently stands at 1.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, having scored 2 percent support in the most recent CNN survey and 1 percent in polls by the Washington Post, Fox News and Politico. He qualified for the CNN debate, but if he has a few more weeks of bad polling, Huntsman could dip below even the minimal standards required for inclusion in debates.
Meanwhile, Johnson keeps on, heading to New Hampshire later this week in a nearly invisible campaign. “They’ve made a decision that I’m irrelevant,” he says. Soon, he might have company.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
