Inject transparency, and make it possible for other parties to participate.
Inject transparency, and make it possible for other parties to participate.
T he Republican National Committee voted unanimously this past Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, the group that has organized general-election debates for 35 years.
RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the commission is “biased and has refused to enact simple and commonsense reforms to help ensure fair debates.” The GOP will amend its rules, she pledged, “to ensure our nominee does not participate in CPD-sponsored debates and will begin looking for acceptable alternatives.”
CNN’s John Avlon responded by saying that “trying to shut down presidential debates shows a lack of confidence in being able to win a contest of ideas.” That ignores the fact that the GOP is looking for new partners, not trying to end the practice of debates. Avlon may be on to something in claiming that, “at the end of the day, it’s really just about fealty to Trump.” Donald Trump’s anger at the commission probably fueled some of the RNC’s ire.
If that anger is exaggerated, the commission surely has made enough missteps in its checkered history to prompt a fresh look at its effective monopoly on debates.
The debate commission was formed in 1987 as a nonprofit sponsored by both the Republican and Democratic parties. It is primarily financed by law firms and corporations. Before its formation, debates had been organized by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters (LWV). Both parties had reason to be angry with the LWV, and they formed the commission with the express purpose of seizing control from it so they could exercise unprecedented control over the debates. “The campaigns’ agreement is a closed-door masterpiece,” Nancy Neuman, then the league’s president, wrote. “Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates’ organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding, and self-serving demands.”
The LWV had irritated the two parties by insisting on the presence of independent John Anderson in a 1980 debate and by refusing to knuckle under to the demands of major-party nominees — demands that often ran to a dozen pages or more. In 1984, the Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale campaigns rejected 80 names the LWV had put forward as potential moderators.
The announcement of the formation of the Commission on Presidential Debates made clear early on what its partisan interests were. Frank Fahrenkopf, who was then chair of the Republican Party and who continues to co-chair the CPD to this day, said it was unlikely to include third-party candidates in any debate.
His Democratic counterpart back in 1987, Paul Kirk, said at the time that he believed that all third-party candidates should be excluded. Indeed, the only time the CPD has allowed an outside candidate was in 1992, when Ross Perot was allowed to debate. But the commission opposed his inclusion; Perot was added only at the insistence of both President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Each of them believed that Perot was draining the most votes from the other.
The commission’s rules today prevent any candidates beyond the Democratic or Republican nominees in debates unless that candidate draws at least 15 percent of the vote in a slew of surveys. Parties or candidates who win 5 percent of the national vote are eligible for federal funding of their next campaign, but they must demonstrate three times that amount of support to speak to a nationwide debate audience.
Challenges to these and other CPD rules have been routinely launched over the years, but all have failed. A federal lawsuit launched by Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016 was dismissed on technical grounds. A lawsuit by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, was filed that same year and also failed. Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, wound up winning 3.3 percent of the vote, and Stein won 1.1 percent. No doubt, both would have done substantially better and could have even earned future federal funding if they’d been included in even one debate.
But in a 1992 case, the Supreme Court declined to recognize any obligation of even public TV stations to include in the debates any candidates from non-major parties. But the Court did note that presidential debates are “the only occasion during a campaign when the attention of a large portion of the American public is focused on the election.”
Since then, the CPD has gradually irritated its Republican backers more than its Democratic ones. In 2020, Steve Scully from C-SPAN was scheduled to moderate a debate even though he had interned for Joe Biden while in college. Even Avlon acknowledged that was “a bad look” especially given that Scully secretly attempted to seek advice from Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump aide turned Never Trumper, and then lied about it by declaring that his Twitter account had been hacked. The commission went out of its way to defend Scully’s implausible story right up to the moment he confessed.
In 2012, the commission also stood by moderator Candy Crowley of CNN after she took the extraordinary step of interrupting the debate to “fact-check” GOP nominee Mitt Romney during a debate with Barack Obama. Most galling, her “fact check” (on whether and when Obama had called the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi an act of terror) was arguably wrong and just happened to come down in favor of Obama’s side of the argument.
Last year, the RNC’s McDaniel sent a letter to the CPD outlining several changes it wanted the commission to make. They included adopting term limits for its board, making its meetings more transparent, and prohibiting board members from making public comments about any candidates (six of its ten board members have publicly criticized Trump). She also called for disqualifying debate moderators “who have apparent conflicts of interest due to personal, professional, or partisan factors.”
Perhaps the most relevant request for voters was a request that at least one debate should take place before the start of early voting. In 2020, more than half the states had begun early voting before Biden and Trump met for their first debate. Overseas and military voting had already begun in all 50 states.
Commission co-chairman Frank Fahrenkopf told the Washington Post earlier this year that negotiations with the RNC had broken down because it “wanted to control things we aren’t prepared to let them control.”
No one believes that it will be easy to formulate a new debate framework. Republicans will no doubt anger the corporate media by declaring that many of its prominent members are too biased to moderate. Democrats will no doubt continue to insist that Fox News’ participation be limited — they already refuse to have any primary debates on Fox News.
But after 35 years of the commission’s glacier-like grip on debates, it’s time to have a thaw and welcome new ideas and new players. With more than two years to go before the next set of general-election debates, we have time to sort it out. Let the debate over the debates begin.