Uncertainties looming for GOP presidential debate
With a month to go before the first Republican presidential debate, the stage in Milwaukee remains remarkably unsettled, with the front-runner, former President Donald Trump, waffling on his attendance and the rest of the participants far from certain.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in. So are Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, Sen. Tim Scott, also of South Carolina, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and author. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and scourge of Trump, said he would be on the stage as well.
But the Republican National Committee’s complicated criteria to qualify for the Aug. 23 gathering — based on candidates’ donors and polling numbers — have created real problems for others in the field.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who would be a serious candidate for the Republican nomination by most measures, may not be invited to debate because of the RNC’s measures: Candidates must have at least 40,000 individual donors, along with 1% in three national polls of Republican voters or 1% in two national polls and two polls in the early primary states.
The debate in Milwaukee — the first of three scheduled so far — has been billed by the party and the candidates as an inflection point in a race that has remained in stasis, even with its front-runner under state and federal indictment, with more charges expected soon. Trump is likely to face charges next month stemming from his efforts to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia, and he has been notified that he could be indicted soon on federal charges for clinging to power after his electoral defeat.
Yet he remains the prohibitive leader in state and national polling, with DeSantis a distant second and the rest of the field clustered in single digits.
The debate will offer the dark horses perhaps their last shot at making an impression, if they can qualify, and all candidates not named Trump a chance to present themselves as the true alternative to the legally challenged former president. Over the next month, political observers will see a steady taunting of the front-runner by candidates who see a no-lose scenario. Either they goad Trump to share the stage with them, giving them equal billing with the front-runner and a chance to take a shot at him, or they paint him as too scared to show up, denting his tough-guy image.
“As Gov. DeSantis has already said, he looks forward to participating in the debates and believes Trump should as well — nobody is entitled to this nomination; they must earn it,” said Bryan Griffin, a spokesperson for the DeSantis campaign.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Christie promised, “I’ll be on this stage for all of the debates, and I will hold Donald Trump personally responsible for failing us.”
For his part, Trump has stayed noncommittal. Senior advisers have counseled him against showing up and validating his challengers, but his rivals believe they can prick his ego and shame him to the stage.
“You’re leading people by 50 or 60 points, you say, why would you be doing a debate?” Trump said on Fox News last weekend. “It’s actually not fair. Why would you let someone who’s at zero or one or two or three be popping you with questions?”
Narrowing the field
In some sense, the Milwaukee debate is haunted by the circuslike atmosphere that pervaded the Republican debates of 2015 and 2016, when Trump ran roughshod over crowded stages with insulting nicknames and constant interruptions. At one point, the discussion devolved into lewd references to the significance of the size of Trump’s hands.
The RNC’s thresholds were intended to keep the number of participants down and ensure that only serious candidates made the stage. The final roster will not be set until 48 hours before debate night, when the last polls come in and the candidates must pledge that they will back the eventual Republican nominee.
But with a month to go, the polling and donor thresholds — imperfect as they may be — are already narrowing the field.
Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the RNC, said Friday on Fox Business that a candidate who cannot win more than “40,000 different small dollar donations” is “not going to be competitive against Joe Biden.”
Candidates such as Ramaswamy and Scott have used the donor rules to tout the power of their campaigns beyond the single digits they have garnered in national polling.
“Tim will be on the debate stage for months to come thanks to over 145,000 donations from over 53,000 unique donors across all 50 states,” said Nathan Brand, a spokesperson for the Scott campaign.
Long-shot candidates such as Los Angeles commentator Larry Elder, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas and business owner Perry Johnson are not likely to make the cut.
In an interview Friday, Elder said he was only about halfway to the donor threshold and that because his name is often omitted from Republican polling, reaching 1% could be impossible. For candidates like him, he conceded, making the stage is existential for his campaign.
“It’s crucial for me to get on that debate stage; that’s Plan A, and Plan B is to make Plan A work,” he said, suggesting there is no other option.
Falling short?
Some candidates, such as Pence and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, could also fall short of qualifying. Pence, who has easily cleared the polling threshold but has badly lagged in fundraising, launched an email blitz Wednesday, pleading for 40,000 people to send his campaign $1. Hutchinson is still short of 40,000 but did reach 1% in a qualifying national poll this month.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum may still qualify, in part because the wealthy former software executive is offering $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 people who donate at least $1 to his campaign. He is also pumping up his standing in early-state polls with a wellfinanced ad blitz.
“Gov. Burgum will absolutely be on the debate stage next month,” said his spokesperson, Lance Trover.
Burgum is not alone in his creative fundraising strategies. Ramaswamy, who like Burgum is wealthy enough to self-fund his presidential bid, is offering donors a 10% cut of the donations they get from those they convince to give to his campaign. Suarez last week said he would enter anyone who sends his campaign $1 into a raffle for Lionel Messi’s first game with Inter Miami, the South Florida Major League Soccer club.
“It corrupts the process. It makes us look foolish. It makes us look silly,” said Elder, who accused the RNC of stacking the deck for elected officials and the super rich.
Christie is making something of a mockery of another RNC demand — that every candidate sign a pledge to back the eventual nominee. Christie, who was once a confidant of Trump’s and is now his sworn enemy, has said he will sign the pledge, but he has added that he will take the promise as seriously as Trump takes his promises — that is to say, not seriously at all. In spring 2016, Trump reneged on a similar pledge, though it became moot when he secured the nomination.
Karl Rickett, a spokesperson for Christie, said Friday that the former governor had not swerved from that stand.
Hurd has said he will not sign the pledge, but there is little indication he can make the debate stage anyway.
For his part, Trump may make a mockery of the debate itself. In 2016, he skipped a Republican primary debate over his feud with Fox New host Megyn Kelly and “counterprogrammed” a benefit for veterans in Des Moines, Iowa. On his Truth Social media site Sunday, Trump said “so many people have suggested” that he debate former Fox News star Tucker Carlson on the night of the first Republican debate.
Aides to rival campaigns last week said the RNC should place sanctions on Trump if he pulls a similar stunt in August.
The RNC just wants Trump on the stage. Last week, McDaniel and David Bossie, who chairs the party’s debates committee, traveled to Bedminster, N.J., to urge him to attend, but he remained noncommittal, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Instead, he ran through various scenarios for what would happen if he did or didn’t participate, including saying that if he didn’t do the first debate, he likely wouldn’t do the others because he would look desperate if he slid in polls and started participating.
Whether Trump shows up, he will be the target of his rivals for the next four weeks. And if the former president does not show, he still could attend the debate at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., in September, or the one in Alabama in October.