Republican voters overwhelmingly agree with Fox News’ decision to limit the upcoming Republican primary debate to the top 10 candidates, according to the latest Bloomberg Politics poll.
The first debate, co-hosted by Fox News and Facebook, is scheduled for Thursday evening in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the GOP’s crowded field of presidential candidates, only 10 White House contenders will be selected to participate in the prime-time forum based on their standing in five national polls from major organizations.
While Fox News and the Republican National Committee have been criticized by both media personalities and candidates who are unlikely to make it onto the debate stage, nearly three-quarters of Republicans approve of the criteria that have been put in place.
According to Bloomberg’s nationwide survey of registered Republican voters, 71 percent respondents support the decision to limit the first debate to the 10 candidates with the highest national poll numbers. Twenty-four percent disapprove and 5 percent declined to give an opinion.
Since Donald Trump entered the race in mid-June, a significant portion of 2016 campaign coverage has been focused on the ongoing bickering between GOP candidates. However, a majority of Republican voters said they’d prefer to see the candidates engage in civil discourse during Thursday’s debate rather than launch attacks on each other’s character.
While 39 percent of respondents in the same poll said the “better path” for candidates to take would be to directly criticize their opponents to demonstrate their differences, 52 percent said Republicans should “play nice and avoid criticism so as not to damage the ultimate nominee.”
A number of GOP candidates who have struggled to make headway in national Republican primary polls have criticized the first-of-its-kind debate structure. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum previously called the rules “pretty arbitrary” and Carly Fiorina’s national finance chairman, Terry Neese, said on Monday that “historically, national polling at this stage in the race has been misleading.” Both Santorum and Fiorina are unlikely to make it onto the debate stage, but are slated to participate in a 90-minute forum hours before the debate takes place.
Retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is likely to secure a spot on the stage, but said on CNN Monday that he wished “more thought could be put into ways to include everybody,” as previously reported by the Washington Examiner.
In late July, RNC spokesman Sean Spicer penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal saying the Committee was unable to “manipulate the criteria for entry into the debates” due to legal limitations.
“This system may not be perfect, but had the RNC not tried to improve the debate process, I can assure you that the debates would be neither this inclusive nor this orderly,” Spicer wrote at the time.
