Mike Huckabee is done playing by the rules.
The former Arkansas governor received less airtime during the Republican presidential debate broadcast by CNN in September than all but one of the 10 other candidates he shared the stage with, During the nearly three-hour prime time program, Huckabee received just 6.9 percent of talk time allotted to the 11 candidates. Only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who exited the 2016 race a few days later, spoke less.
Huckabee, who spent seven years hosting his own nationally televised Fox News show and is hardly a wallflower, is determined not to let that happen again when Republicans gather in Boulder, Colo., this month for the third debate. In an interview Friday, the Huckabee campaign said the Arkansan would assert himself on stage, even if that means ignoring the CNBC moderators and the debate rules they establish.
“We’re definitely not going to allow what happened in the CNN debate to happen again,” Huckabee advisor Hogan Gidley said. “The governor has always been respectful of the rules and the process but he’s going to get his point across.”
“We’re not going to let the moderators dictate the outcome of a presidential election,” Gidley added.
The Republican contenders face off for the third time Oct. 28, in the Coors Events Center on the campus of the University of Colorado, just north of Denver. As with the previous two debates, CNBC is breaking it up into two broadcasts. The early debate will feature the lower tier candidates. The candidates polling at 2.5 percent or higher in selection of national surveys will get a podium in prime time.
Huckabee currently stands in eighth place, at 2.9 percent in the RealClearPolitics.com average; he ranks 12th in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings.
The debates have presented perils unique to this campaign. Never before has the candidate field been so crowded so as to make it impossible to include all them on one debate stage. But even if you secure a spot in prime time and avoid being relegated to the happy hour debate, there’s the issue of getting airtime. With so many contenders participating in the main event, there’s no guarantee that airtime will be distributed evenly.
That matters. As discovered in the aftermath of the first debate in August, televised by Fox News, and the mid September CNN debate, even if a candidate performed well when answering questions and interacting with other contenders, voters tended to conflate lack of talk time with personal weakness and a lack of presidential gravitas. The result was a losing grade overall.
That’s a potential political disaster, particularly for an underdog like Huckabee who is otherwise among the more articulate Republicans running for president, given the impact of the televised debates on the GOP primary. “You don’t get extra points for being polite,” said a Republican strategist who advised a presidential candidate four years ago. “If they want airtime, they’re going to have to take it.”
“If you were to watch these debates with a roomful of persuadable voters, you’d witness applause every time a candidate seized an opportunity to kick the debate up a notch and make it a real debate about big issues,” added Kevin Madden, a Republican consultant who advised 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. “I’d prepare a candidate to preface a grab for more time with a declaration along the lines of, ‘I’m going to finish, because this is an issue voters care about, it’s an issue that’s important for our country’s future and it’s too important to interrupt because of a need to go to commercials later on as part of your broadcast.'”
Even candidates who received rave reviews for their debate performances have been frustrated by the lack of airtime, compared to that given others. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas did well on CNN last month, but still complained in an interview on Fox News after the debate about the uneven distribution of talk time by moderator Jake Tapper.
“I would have liked more air time,” Cruz said then. “This is the second time in a row — Fox did the same thing — where they didn’t ask me a whole lot of questions.”
According to an analysis compiled by the Examiner’s Jason Russell, front-runner Donald Trump received by far the most attention and airtime of the CNN debate, getting 14.4 percent of the available talk time. The billionaire New York businessman/entertainer was followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 11.4 percent; businesswoman Carly Fiorina at 10.2 percent; retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 9.5 percent; Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida at 8.9 percent; and Cruz at 8.2 percent.
The theme of the CNBC debate is jobs and the economy, a subject that received surprisingly short shrift in the first two face-offs considering voters consistently rank the topic as No. 1 on their list of priorities when deciding who to vote for.
The Fox News and CNN debates were substantive. But according to an analysis compiled by Republican pollster David Winston, just 13 questions, or 9.6 percent of all asked by the Fox and CNN moderators, related to the economy. By comparison, 19.9 percent of questions were about the candidates’ electability; 14 percent were about social issues and 22.8 percent were about foreign policy. Granted, foreign policy is a topic Republican primary voters have ranked high.
“We can already see that the debates seem to be falling to a pattern similar to 2012, when the distribution of topics didn’t quite match what voters were concerned about,” Winston and his colleagues wrote in their analysis.
