In the wake of last week’s CNBC debate, Republican presidential candidates are clamoring for changes to the debate program going forward, and they have a point.
The Republican National Committee spent the last two years overhauling the primary-debate schedule in anticipation of a GOP field that looked like 2012’s. The reduction in the number of debates, the nationwide distribution, and the counterbalancing conservative-media presence were designed to ensure that a frontrunner would not have to advance to the general election badly bloodied — something that the RNC believes hurt Mitt Romney in the last cycle. In the current field — crowded, diverse, entirely unlike that of four years ago — those reforms have proven detrimental.
In a large field, the obvious preference should be for more debates with fewer candidates. The arbitrary division of the field into a crowded “main stage” event and a tiny “undercard” creates unnecessary conflict offstage, as candidates complain about the criteria for qualifying, and onstage, as they jostle each other just to be heard. Even in CNN’s three-hour debate, most candidates spoke for less than 12 minutes. Meanwhile, the undercard debate is reduced to a footnote. Smaller debates with randomly allocated participants would give candidates more speaking time, pit them against different sets of opponents, and give low-polling candidates a chance to make their case.
#related#As for the problem of media bias, why is it necessary that every debate be hosted by a media outlet? Why couldn’t the RNC rent its own space, pick its own moderators, and extend an invitation to any outlets that want to broadcast the event to set up in the back? Such events would probably lack the glamour that have accompanied the debates so far. After all, networks and moderators are interested in raising their own profiles, and refusing them hosting rights would diminish their incentives to become involved, as small groups that have hosted networkless debates have discovered. But debates hosted by the RNC itself would be much better situated to break that mold.
Having just overhauled the debate program, the RNC cannot be eager to improvise new changes in medias res. But it has been given an unexpected second chance, and the committee should embrace it.
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