Democrats are trying to learn from 2016 and prevent the same problems in the nomination race.
The Democratic National Committee’s newly released rules for participation in the September presidential primary debate reveal a party experimenting with ways to exert control over a large field of candidates. But what’s most notable about these rules is how they show the party wrestling with the lessons of 2016.
The new rules ramp up the polling and fundraising thresholds for candidates to be invited to September’s DNC-sanctioned debate:
To appear in the party’s third debate, which will be broadcast by ABC News and Univision, candidates will have to earn 2 percent support in four party-sanctioned polls between late June and August. In addition, they will have to show they’ve attracted at least 130,000 donors since the start of the campaign, including at least 400 from 20 different states.
These thresholds are twice as high as they are for the summer debates, and now candidates will have to clear both the polling and fundraising hurdles, instead of just one of them.
Based on research and interviews I’ve been conducting, these debate rules appear to signal a party adapting to what are generally seen as three main lessons from the 2016 election. Those lessons are:
So the party is attempting to satisfy several (contradictory!) goals at once. It seeks to cull an oversized field but in a way that does not appear systematically biased against any particular set of candidates. Well, it’s apparently okay to be biased against one set of candidates — the unpopular. Those who have been less successful in introducing themselves to primary voters have also been less successful in raising money.
Presumably, those less successful candidates are the ones most likely to drop out in the early 2020 contests, so making them ineligible to participate in the 2019 debates just accelerates that process by a few months. (And the party is even hedging against that a bit by pitting less popular candidates against more popular ones in the early debates, unlike the GOP’s 2015 approach of creating overcard and undercard contests.)
To be clear, major parties have used rising polling thresholds in past nomination contests, as Julia Azari and I noted here and here. But the fundraising targets are new, and these goals are being announced well in advance, giving candidates a clear set of targets to hit.
Does the DNC’s approach harm other groups of candidates? There’s some evidence that women and people of color face somewhat greater challenges in fundraising than white men do, as Eugene Scott has noted. However, these lessons may not apply at the presidential level for the 2020 contest. Nearly all declared candidates seem to have qualified for next month’s debate, and those that haven’t yet include white men like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA). And as for the September debate, this FiveThirtyEight analysis suggests only a handful of candidates have qualified for it so far, with those ineligible candidates being overwhelmingly white men.
Of course, who ends up qualifying for the September debate will hinge on how the summer debates go — lesser-known candidates could have break-out performances and attract supporters and donors, while leading candidates could stumble. We just don’t know what that field of candidates will look like.
But what we’re watching is a party, in an unusually assertive way for the modern era, trying to shape a presidential field and proclaim in a clear and unbiased way who may and may not participate. This is a difficult needle to thread, and it will almost certainly be put to the test at some point — perhaps an omitted candidate with an enthusiastic base of supporters will protest or file a lawsuit, as has happened before. At that point, we’ll see whether the DNC prioritizes the winnowing or the appearance of neutrality more.
Author: Seth Masket
Read More
The debate over the Anthropocene epoch, explained. The word “Anthropocene” has gained cultural resonance in…
President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrive for a photo during…
Rescued chickens gather in an aviary at Farm Sanctuary’s Southern California Sanctuary on October 5,…
Six Supreme Court justices attend President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. |…
Flights to LaGuardia Airport were delayed last June due to smoke and poor visibility. |…
Jessica Gunning as “Martha” in Baby Reindeer. | Ed Miller/Netflix With the Baby Reindeer fallout, the paradox…