The DNC has been roiled with allegations of unfairness in their primary debate system, and for good reason.
The debate entry requirements, while not intentionally discriminatory, are clearly arbitrary. Every debate has had two qualifying components: an amount of high enough polling and an amount of unique donors. For the first debate, candidates only needed three polls showing 1% national support from approved pollsters and 65,000 unique donors. For the December debate, it’s four polls showing 4% support nationally and/or in select early states (or two showing 6% in early states) and 200,000 unique donors.
But the pollsters allowed seem extraordinarily random, and the polling thresholds announced just before each debate cycle makes it seem as though they’re cherry-picking their preferred candidates. While the DNC can’t demand that the moderators more fairly allocate speaking time — you may remember MSNBC giving Andrew Yang a little more than half the airtime it gave Kamala Harris despite near parity in their polling numbers — they can do one thing to create an air of fairness.
The DNC ought to announce the qualifying rules for each and every debate in the rest of the primary now.
Just as they have with previous debates, the DNC will surely increase the polling and donor count requirements. But they would be wise to do two things: approve more pollsters and include ballot qualification as a metric.
Just 15 pollsters qualify according to the DNC’s restrictive standards, which exclude highly accurate organizations like Emerson, Survey USA, Gravis, and Harris. This has led to an odd phenomenon where a candidate like Andrew Yang routinely becomes the last candidate to qualify for a debate despite polling better than — in the case of Tom Steyer, twice as well — candidates who qualified quicker. By expanding the number of qualifying pollsters, the DNC could increase their national polling standard to 5% or even more without running the risk of Steyer making the debate stage instead of the better polling Yang or Amy Klobuchar.
The DNC, of course, has every right to rig their primary, but if they want the debate stage to be an accurate reflection of the choices voters will actually have to make some springtime, they’d be wise to do this and also start allowing on the candidates based on the ballots for which they have qualified.
The deadline for plenty of early states’ primary filing has passed, and for the four January and February debates, the DNC could add the number of states in which a candidate will appear on a primary ballot as a qualification. At this point in the primary, the debates ought to reflect reality, and even if Michael Bloomberg cannot meet the donor requirement, it seems unfair that voters will not see him debate if he’ll be a very viable option for early states. (This is a big “if,” however, because Bloomberg is focusing on later states in the primary process.)
And most importantly, the DNC ought to announce the rules for all four debates now. If they set a 6% national polling threshold for the last debate now, no one can accuse them of rigging the system to keep candidates on or off the stage. Given the civil war that has persisted since the Bernie Bros protested the DNC’s fixing the game for Hillary Clinton four years ago, they’d be wise to accrue every ounce of credibility they can get.
