League of Women Voters should still be in charge of debates

The DNC - party leaders - have too much control over what the public gets to hear.

The new polling and donation requirements to make the third and fourth Democratic primary debates could winnow the field dramatically.

The Democratic National Committee’s stricter new requirements for presidential contenders to appear in party debates this fall triggered swift backlash Wednesday from Democratic candidates, many of whom are now in danger of being cut from the showcase events in September and October.

Some campaigns have already been struggling to reach the 65,000-donor threshold — or secure one percent in three qualified polls — to gain access to the first debates in June and July. But the DNC’s new criteria for the next round of debates — support from 130,000 unique donors as well as at least 2 percent support in four polls — is set to winnow out senators, governors and a number of other Democratic candidates who are not on a trajectory to hit the polling requirement and could have particular trouble hitting the donor requirement absent a viral moment or another future campaign-shaking event.

“The DNC is playing a gatekeeping function and they’re creating a filter to determine which candidates can make their arguments to the American people,” former Rep. John Delaney, who is largely self-funding his presidential campaign, said in an interview with POLITICO after sending a letter to the DNC to request more information on how the requirements were set. “A lot of very consequential rules are being created by the DNC, and we don’t know what goes into them.”

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“Whether it’s hiring organizers, staffing, polling, any normal things that you do to build an operation — all has to get readjusted and cut because you now have to run Facebook ads,” said one Democratic presidential aide, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “You’re not building a movement that way.

“They are decimating the field,” the aide continued.

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“For the debates to be meaningful, they have to winnow down the participants,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “This is the uncomfortable reality both the DNC and the candidates have to face.”

DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa defended the DNC’s debate qualifications as “fair, transparent and appropriate for each phase of the primary season,” she said in a statement. “We are confident that the two sets of criteria we have announced thus far achieve those goals, and have been communicated to candidates months before each debate."

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“I don’t think they should be winnowing the field,” Sen. Michael Bennet, who only jumped into the presidential race this month, told reporters in New Hampshire on Wednesday. “I certainly don’t think the DNC should be favoring national fundraising and cable television over the early states like New Hampshire.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has echoed that criticism, arguing that the criteria aren’t a measure of success, electability or candidate quality. Gillibrand, who was one of the premier online fundraisers in the Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018, is still striving to hit the 65,000-donor criteria for the first debates, though she has qualified via polling.

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“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at that criteria and know who's going to get kicked out,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. “It’s easy to see that the debates in the fall are going to be a bunch of white men and, if that’s the case, that’s a big misstep.”

Four candidates have already publicly said they have crossed the new, higher donor threshold: Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren. O'Rourke and Biden each got roughly 100,000 individual donors on their campaign launch days, meaning they could have passed the 130,000 threshold by now.

Seven others have publicly said they’ve hit the halfway mark to 130,000: Booker, Castro, Gabbard, Inslee, Klobuchar, Williamson and Yang. (Yang tweeted he needed another “20,000 or so” donors to hit the new threshold on Wednesday, calling it “very doable.”) Among the candidates scrambling to catch up: Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, the only candidate running who has carried a Trump state.

In early polling, just eight candidates have crossed the modest 2 percent threshold in four qualifying polls: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Buttiigeg and O’Rourke. None of these early polls will count toward qualifying for the later debates; only polls publicly released after the first debate in June will count in the criteria for the fall debates.

  Politico