An unconscionable debate delay

Pundits are preoccupied with the primary debates, like Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas. But next fall’s presidential debates are far more important. They’ll directly determine who sits in the White House into the next decade and maybe beyond.

The major-party nominees will be on the stage for those debates starting Sept. 26, 2016. The big question is whether they’ll have competition. Surveys show record antagonism toward the two major parties, and, by a two-to-one margin, voters want a chance to vote for a viable independent candidate.

{mosads}Incredibly enough, whether they will get that chance is up to a group dominated by party stalwarts like its co-chairs, Frank Fahrenkopf, the former head of the Republican party, and Mike McCurry, the former press secretary to Bill Clinton. For the past quarter-century, the group has successfully kept independents off the stage. “No more Ross Perots!” is their unstated rallying cry.

This group, the Commission on Presidential Debates, promised to announce its debate admissions criteria a year before the first contest. So far, the CPD is two weeks late, and counting. If you’re not in the debates, you can’t get elected, and, in itself, a year is barely enough time to prepare a campaign. But the commission keeps delaying.

It’s got a serious dilemma. Since 2000, the CPD has used a polling threshold as its main criterion, but polling in political races has come under severe criticism in recent months.

Polls have recently produced “spectacular disasters” in predicting the winners of elections in Israel and Britain and for our own Congress, wrote Cliff Zukin of Rutgers, the former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, in a June op-ed in the New York Times.

As America goes mobile, landline phone surveys miss up to three-fifths of the U.S. population. Response rates have dropped from 36 percent for Pew in 1997 to just 8 percent last year. And drawing representative samples of the voting population is nearly impossible.

An article in Politico last week surveyed pollsters and found that they unanimously warned about the inaccuracy of surveys that determine who gets into the primary debates. “Polls are being used for a job they’re not really intended for,” said Zukin.

Then last Tuesday, Gallup dropped a bombshell. Its editor-in-chief, Frank Newport, said the research organization was not planning any polls for the primaries and won’t commit to tracking the general election.

What makes this decision so important is that since 2000 Gallup has been the polling adviser to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the gatekeeper for the four final presidential and vice-presidential debates. The CPD’s main criterion for admission to the debate stage is polling above 15 percent in mid-September, less than two months before the election.

Delaying a determination date until just before the election, the CPD effectively prevents independents from gaining enough name recognition to get high polling number in the first place. It’s a Catch-22. But another problem is simply the inaccuracy of polling itself, now being revealed in all its glory.

Last September, a group called Level the Playing Field, filed a petition for a rulemaking with the Federal Election Commission to force the CPD to open up the debates to one other participant. During the comment period, more than 1,000 individuals and organizations supported the request while only one — the CPD itself — opposed it.

Included in the CPD’s response was an affidavit, “under penalty of perjury,” from Frank Newport of Gallup stating: “Public polling is by far the best method of measuring a candidate’s support among the electorate prior to Election Day.  Polling involves a scientific process through which polling experts seek to determine, mathematically, the best estimate of the public sentiment on a particular topic at a specific point in time.”

Well, maybe no longer.

Gallup’s decision not to poll for the primaries – and possibly for the general – may be what’s holding up the CPD’s release of its criteria for access to the 2016 debate stage.

But whatever the reason, the delay is unconscionable. The CPD polling rule is the parties’ bulwark against competition. As Ann Ravel, chair of the FEC, wrote in July, “The effect of the 15-percent polling threshold has been that, since its adoption [in 2000], only the two major party candidates have appeared in the debates. The Commission’s regulations require that nomination by a major party may not be the sole objective criterion to determine who may participate in a debate. However, the criteria established by CPD seem to have accomplished the same result by different means.”

If not polls, then what?

Several members of a reform group called Change the Rule — including former legislators like Sen. Bob Kerrey, Reps. Lee Hamilton and Vin Weber, and Gov. Tom Kean, plus former CIA Director Mike Hayden and Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond — have proposed a national online primary to pick one winner at least six months before the election. This would give the winning independent enough time to develop media notice and funding to compete with the Democratic and Republican nominees. Another proposal focuses on gathering signatures across the country – the means that every state uses to determine ballot access (none uses polling).

I believe that there are dozens of Americans out there who could be great presidents – not merely current and former public officials but CEOs and academic and military leaders. Because they don’t toe the line on party orthodoxy, they don’t want to run as Republicans or Democrats. Nor do voters want them to. Americans want more choices, and an unelected debate commission must stop standing in the way.

Glassman, former under secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, is an adviser to Level the Playing Field, which seeks to reform the presidential debate rules.