Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her campaign are all but conceding that she will not make it onto the stage for the first Republican presidential primary debate.
In a campaign memo sent out to reporters, Fiorina’s national finance chairman, Terry Neese, criticized Fox News for relying on national polls to determine who will make it into the debate and set the expectation that Fiorina likely won’t be a part of it.
“We have built an operation that can go the distance and win,” Neese said. “Our strategy does not depend on any one single event to propel our candidate forward. The ground game matters and there is an operation in Delaware, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina, with more to come.”
The Fox News primetime debate will be held Thursday and is open only to candidates who place in the top 10 of an average of national polls. A separate “forum” will take place several hours earlier and will be open to another few candidates – likely including Fiorina – who did not make the cut.
Exclusion from the primetime debate will potentially result in at least the appearance of a campaign’s diminished capacity to win the GOP nomination among the public and Republican donors.
Many conservative activists, political watchers and several of the Republican contenders have complained that using national polls so early in the campaign merely rewards name recognition of the candidates among the public.
“National polling at this stage captures name ID – and because Carly is not a professional politician or a celebrity, she still has the lowest name ID in the field,” Neese wrote in the memo. “Historically, national polling at this stage in the race has been misleading, underestimating the candidacies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”
The Republican National Committee has defended the debate schedule as the “most inclusive setup in history.”
