Should Carly Fiorina be included in ABC News’s Saturday night Republican debate? Why not?
The argument for limiting participation in debates was relevant when there were 17 Republican candidates. How could you include them all in a two- or even three-hour debate? But that argument is obsolete now.
Since the Iowa results have come in, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have all ended their campaigns. That leaves eight live Republican candidates, in order of their current national poll standing: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina. All except Christie won one or more delegates in Iowa and Christie, like Kasich, has concentrated his efforts in New Hampshire. (I’m not counting Jim Gilmore, who got 12 votes out of 186,000 cast in Iowa.)
The stage and the two-hour format can accommodate eight candidates just about as well as it can accommodate seven. Four of the eight are polling under 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls: Fiorina (2.2 percent) is imperceptibly behind Christie (3.0 percent) and Kasich (2.8 percent). Meanwhile, in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, Fiorina is in eighth place. Under these circumstances the Republican party would be poorly advised to acquiesce in the exclusion of its one female candidate.
So how about it, ABC?
