A candidate’s debate should include all candidates. When we have our gubernatorial elections in Maine, the debates always include every candidate who wishes to join. Presidential debates should be the same way. Primaries are the exception to this. I understand having each candidate from the same party debate.
They are. They simply require certain levels of support - usually 5% - to qualify to appear. Without some sort of limit we’d get what happened in the California recall election of Gray Davis where 135 candidates qualified for the ballot. It was chaotic and most of them weren’t serious and were just taking up space.
I am confident that any third party candidate that had any chance at all of winning an election would be included in all post-primary presidential debates. After all, the goal of whomever is hosting one of these debates (usually a television network) is to get as many eyeballs as possible glued to the debate so as to garner as many advertising dollars as possible.
41 3rd party and independent candidates.
That would make for a rather crowded stage.
Do you think we should force private companies to host candidates they don’t want to?
Right.
The standard should be how many Senators and members of the House of Representatives are from the candidate’s party. If you have very low support in Congress, you can’t govern effectively no matter how good you are at debating.
Now, I can see erring on the side of being inclusive for the sake of democracy. What if we start inviting the Greens when they get ten percent in Congress?
When Lincoln ran for President, the Republicans already has pluralities in both Houses. This is the sort of model that makes sense to me.
Debates are run by private organizations, they can include whomever they want.
Agreed. I was giving them unsolicited advice, and support their right to ignore it.
Ross Perot and his running mate both participated in their respective debates when he ran in 1992 & 96. I can’t remember if Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan ever did. IIRC, in 1980 Jimmy Carter refused to attend any debates which included third party candidate John Anderson, sat out the first two, and the organization sponsoring the debates finally excluded Anderson from the third and final debate because he was polling so poorly that they did not consider his presence to be worth it if it meant excluding Carter instead.
I always love it when the Libertarian Party sues the Commission on Presidential Debates. They literally want the government to force a private entity to make a TV show to benefit them.
Do you think private companies should be gatekeepers for election to public office? Private companies that make money from political advertising, no less?
That private entity is committing fraud by falsely presenting itself as a politically neutral organisation when it is really bought and paid for by the only two groups they allow to participate.
No. But the real world should be a gatekeeper.
The presidential debates should be about the public getting a chance to hear from the nominees who might actually get elected President. It shouldn’t be an opportunity for pretend candidates to get free air time to spout their fringe political theories.
You have the right to support a third party is you choose to do so. But you are not entitled to try to force the rest of us to take you seriously.
How is that fraud? Are there people investing in the CPD on the basis that it’s politically-neutral?
In any case, if the lawsuit succeeds…the major campaigns will simply stop using the commission. They’ll do something else instead, and the joke campaigns will still be relegated to a losers-only debate on C-SPAN3 at 3:17 AM.
I don’t think the president needs to be from one of the two parties to govern effectively. He/She just needs to effectively gather enough support from one or both sides to pass legislation.
I would have no (well little) problem with Bernie Sanders being president - and he is effectively an independent - as was Trump (kinda). Both felt they needed to get on the two party system to make inroads - and then both complained about it.
The problem is that before this election - no one took these people seriously (well not enough) - and generally - other than Trump or Perot - almost everyone that has been a contender - has been a politician. And you do need to be part of the two party system to be effective there - at least in part - Sanders caucused with the democrats.
I do think we will need to rethink the way we do debates in the future. It does seem that people really kinda want a third party candidate. Look at this year, but I don’t think you can limit it to the general - well at least not under some new system.
If you put in the hard work and effort to work up millions of primary votes - the third party candidate better have a decent showing either in votes or the polls to be allowed on stage.
I also think it would be better if we had some sort of pairing off of candidates from both parties early on.
Why not have debate like the Trump/Sanders debate or whatever earlier on in the process.
It would be interesting to see if we could have actual debates where moderators would actually hold the candidates to answering the question and not going back to their talking point.
Something is gotta give.
This country is ripe for a fiscally conservative/socially liberal party (not that I believe in that - just seems like I know and hear lots of people that think that way).
The old rules don’t seem to matter in getting votes as much - and I think we will see something change.
I wonder if OPs should be allowed to come back to their own threads.
Yes. If Sanders bolts to the Greens, he won’t be able to govern effectively because both parties in Congress will want him to be a failed president. For example, Democrat Dwight Evans, considered a shoo-in to be my next member of congress, is a moderate who will not, this November, be elected on anything resembling a Green platform. This is one example of hundreds.
In my view, you don’t understand how difficult it is for the presidential form of government to remain democratic. What usually happens in a presidential republic, when the legislature and president become hopelessly deadlocked, is violence. The US has been an exception but if we start having presidents without legislative support, I don’t see why that will continue.
By the way, a lot of countries have presidents with little power (Austria, Israel) or mixed parliamentary/presidential systems (France). That’s different. The fragility is with the pure presidential republics, mostly seen in Latin America, Africa, and the US.
So, if you want the US to change radically, without violence, there’s no shortcut to the congress-first route. And there’s no reason for the Commission on Presidential Debates to obscure this.
As for Trump, if elected, here’s my prediction. He either will become a conventional Republican, or a conventional Democrat, or get impeached and convicted.
Except we don’t do the debates at all. The candidates do. People can come up with all the reforms they like, and if the candidates won’t show up, it won’t happen
Giving the public a chance to hear from other candidates ought to shift the possibilities of who might actually get elected President. Well, it would, if we had any better voting system than plurality.
But even in the present structure, even granting than no one but the Democratic and Republican Party nominees has a chance, it should still give us better angles on those two, to see them challenged from other directions than just each other.
I like the current format. It simply reflects the reality that either the Republican or Democratic nominee will be the next President, so the public needs to hear primarily from those two candidates. If the Prohibition Party wants to run a candidate, then fine, but they simply are not in the same league as the two major parties.
When a third party even has a semblance of a chance (Perot in 92) he is invited to the debates.