Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign believes establishment Republicans have a plan in place to set up a matchup between Donald Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Chief strategist Curt Anderson said he thinks Republicans have structured the debates in a way to eliminate candidates the people deserve to see.
“I just don’t know when the Republican Party got scared of debates,” Anderson told the Washington Examiner. “It’s all rooted in a notion that Mitt Romney is not president because he hit too many primary debates and I think that is just demonstrably silly.”
“I think their instinct is the wrong one, which is ‘Oh man, we got to shrink the debates because we got to force people out so that we can get down to some Trump-Jeb matchup or something like that.’ My instinct is let people see all the candidates and choose. I have this goofy, novel idea that the voters should choose who the nominee is.”
Few voters have chosen Jindal thus far. He receives the support of 0.3 percent of voters nationwide, according to Real Clear Politics’ average of national surveys. But Anderson maintains that the campaign’s strategy is primarily focused on winning Iowa where he said voters have yet to make up their minds. Jindal fares better in the Hawkeye State, receiving the support of three percent of those surveyed, according to Real Clear Politics average of Iowa polling.
“Three months ago you could have said, ‘Oh we’re going to get the Walker vote,’ but it left,” Anderson said. “Our mindset from the start was to run lean and mean and to never get into a situation where we had built a campaign that we couldn’t pay for, and I just don’t know how many times people have to learn that lesson.”
Another lesson he has enjoyed watching Republicans learn has to do with how the presidential debates differ from the Republican Party’s expectations.
“The really amusing part of it now is that it was a system set up to kind of protect the front-runner from pesky conservative snipers, candidates [and] campaigns, and now it protects Trump,” he said. “If the guy who’s benefitting from fewer debates right now is Trump — which I find that deliciously ironic because most of the establishment is trying to stop him — and yet this is their own little mousetrap they built.”
The GOP did not respond to requests for comment. Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer has maintained that the decision to limit the number of debates came in response to voters’ concerns and that the party cannot structure individual debates’ criterion.
“Federal election law states that only two types of entities may host a debate: a 501(c)(3) organization or a media outlet. The Republican National Committee is neither,” Spicer has said. “It is therefore up to the staging organization to set the criteria and the format. Those who call on the RNC to change the criteria misunderstand the law.”
Anderson said he does not worry about Jindal making the next primetime debate, but the governor has yet to crack the main stage in either of the first two GOP presidential debates. As other presidential candidates like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry quit the race for the White House, Jindal may benefit if he can remain the last conservative governor standing.
