No matter how much some Republican campaigns may complain, the RNC debate requirements are designed to meet one goal: Republican victory.
The Republican National Committee has finally produced a set of criteria that the GOP’s presidential aspirants must meet if they want to appear in any of the sanctioned 2024 debates.
To make the first debate stage, candidates will have to show that they have secured contributions from at least 40,000 individual donors and that they have the support of at least 1 percent of GOP primary voters in national polls. These are low barriers to entry, but they have nonetheless produced howls of displeasure from some of the Republican Party candidates.
“It seems that the RNC is going out of its way to purposely narrow the field at one of the earliest times in the party’s history,” one unnamed Republican consultant complained to Washington Post reporters. “And rather than finding a way for as many conservative voices to be heard by Republicans throughout the country, they are attempting to make this a two-man race.”
Indeed, these modest thresholds are described by Politico as “considerable hurdles” for candidates like Chris Christie, whose strategy centers on the assumption that he will perform well on the debate stage. But Christie hasn’t even begun fundraising yet, and he barely registers in some recent polls (those that bother to even note his candidacy).
Of course, the Republican Party has an abiding interest in performing like a vehicle dedicated to winning elections. Today, that imperative demands that the party do whatever it takes to avoid a multi-candidate pileup on the debate stage, which means barring also-rans with scant hopes of attracting a critical mass of support among GOP primary voters. If Chris Christie can’t attract enough donors or Asa Hutchinson can’t generate enough support in the polls to make the first debate stage, that’s a sign that their candidacies are going nowhere — not that the GOP has maliciously throttled voters’ access to their wisdom. When it comes to presidential candidates whose appeal to Republican voters is extremely limited, the GOP should hasten their exit from the race.
The RNC’s initial criteria have so far been met by six Republican candidacies, which would be the perfect number for a televised debate. A six-way debate would allow voters a good look at the viable presidential aspirants while allowing those candidates to respond both to the moderator’s questions and their rivals’ answers.
The purpose of party-sanctioned debates is not to host a free-wheeling gabfest that is, first and foremost, entertaining. Nor are the parties obliged to consent to courses of action that would jeopardize their prime directive: winning elections. If the result of imposing these modest criteria is to convince Republican candidates who cannot meet them to recognize the futility of their candidacies, good! Better to have that realization dawn on them now than on the eve of Super Tuesday, when the damage they can do to the process has already been done.