When the Democratic National Committee first announced in May it would sanction six primary debates in 2016 and punish candidates who went to unsanctioned events, the party said the schedule was “consistent with the precedent set by the DNC during the 2004 and 2008 cycles.”
In both of those cycles, the DNC also only sanctioned six debates. But those elections were filled with dozens of unsanctioned debates, too, that started at least six months earlier than the DNC plans to kick off its debate season this year, on Oct. 13.
That frenzy is what the committee is trying to prevent from happening this year, and it's what lower-ranking candidates, who would benefit from more chances to appear in nationally televised debates on the same stage as front-runner Hillary Clinton, are rebelling against. Senator Bernie Sanders said he’s “disappointed” with the schedule, while former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley called it “unprecedented” and “outrageous.”
“The DNC may threaten to keep somebody out of a future debate, but it isn’t their invitation.”
Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University
Maybe the solution for lower-polling candidates isn’t to push the DNC to sanction more debates, says Kathleen Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor of communications who has studied and written about presidential debates and political rhetoric. “O’Malley’s attacking the wrong villain,” Jamieson said. “If anyone wants to stand up and sponsor a debate and the candidates want to go to it, you’ll have a debate that the DNC hasn’t sanctioned.”
For example, if a Spanish-language television network said it was going to host two debates, one for Democrats and one for Republicans, Jamieson says it is likely the candidates would ignore the rules set by their committees. “They would accept and go, regardless of whether the RNC and DNC said yes or no, because they want to reach the Hispanic vote,” she said.
O’Malley appears to be hinting he would do just that. In a memo released Tuesday, O’Malley legal counsel Joe Sandler challenged the DNC's exclusion rule, which says that if a candidate attends an unsanctioned debate, they will be barred from future DNC primary debates. The rule is “legally unenforceable,” Sandler said, and if candidates attended an unsanctioned debate, “it is highly unlikely that any of those sponsors of the sanctioned debates would ultimately be willing to enforce that ‘exclusivity’ requirement.”
Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and the author of Presidential Debates: 50 Years of High-Risk TV, agrees, noting that on the Republican side, it has been the debate hosts, not the Republican National Committee, that set the rules for the debates. “The DNC may threaten to keep somebody out of a future debate, but it isn’t their invitation,” he said.
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