This op-ed by Michael Smerconish in the Philadelphia Inquirer is partly an opinion piece, but it is also a news story. The bottom half of the column quotes Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, as saying the CPD is studying whether to eliminate the rule that says no one outside the two major parties may participate unless he or she is at 15% in the polls in early September.
From the article cited, entitled Third-party voices deserve a place in presidential debates:
“We’ll look hard at that, but we also have three or four other proposals as to whether or not to do away with the 15 percent rule,” he said. “We’ve got a special committee of the board that will review it.”
Fahrenkopf expressed concern that a change could benefit wealthy candidates.
“We also have to realize that’s expensive to do this,” he said. “Each state has different rules as to how many petition signatures you have to receive to get on the ballot. So it’s ready-made here for someone who’s a millionaire or billionaire who can spend the money to hire the people to go out and get the signatures. These are the kind of things that we’re plowing through before we make any decision one way or the other. So there are some issues that we’ve got to resolve.”
An impressive lineup of Republicans and Democrats is supporting the rule change, including former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who represented Indiana and cochaired the 9/11 Commission; former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman; former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; and retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Another supporter is David King, senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. King pointed out to me that not even Perot would meet the 15 percent threshold today.
The debates should be open to all candidates with a mathematical chance of winning. If this happened, however, the GOP and Democrats would be teaming up in all states to enact ballot access requirements that would hinder or eliminate all genuine opposition parties.
Here is an excellent article explaining why, from a libertarian perspective, so-called “moderates” or “centrists” are actually the worst of all.
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory126.html
Fahrenkopf is most likely blowing smoke. If they make a change at all, it will still be tailored to keep out LP, Greens and other such ideological opposition parties.
I also think that’s more or less the ideological space Ackerman wants his hypothetical fantasy candidate to fill, which is why Bloomberg was so often mentioned as his desired candidate, both for Unity ’08 as well as Americans Elect in 2012. Bloomberg didn’t bite and I don’t think he will, but if they ever do get a candidate it will be somebody in that mold. Maybe not quite so nanny-state-ish as Bloomberg, but in the sense of being an establishment technocratic centrist, ideally who’s either held office as an independent and/or left one of the major parties to become an independent and/or who gets paired with a running mate from the opposite major party. It won’t be a Libertarian or Green or other ideological minor-party, they made that much clear when the blew up AE rather than let its ballot access get used by any of the candidates that were left seeking their nomination.
I prefer “extreme wrongist” myself!
I’d call Bloomberg a centrist, not as a compliment but just objectively. In Nolan Chart terms, an authoritarian or populist/anti-libertarian centrist for sure, and one who leans more to the left than right, but not a regular standard-issue liberal (compare him to de blasio) or conservative (which is more obvious), nor is he far-left or far-right (on some issues yes, but not on the whole). The worst of both left and right I think, but that’s just as much “centrist” as the best of both or somewhere in between.
” I just hope we don’t end up in a situation where some designated-loser establishment centrist like Bloomberg gets to be on stage with Bush and Clinton…” – Andy Craig
I guess your definition of a centrist differs greatly from mine.
Interesting that his objection to Ackerman et al’s proposal is basically the same one that was noted here: it would allow a candidate like for a billionaire independent Bloomberg or Perot to buy their way into the debate, to the exclusion of others, and that wouldn’t be fair to other third-party candidates, nor would it be an objective uniform rule given the complication of earned ballot access for some parties.
I think there is definitely more pressure- not just Ackerman’s and Johnson’s respective efforts but in general- about debate exclusion going into 2016. It’s particularly noteworthy that it’s happening now, so far out from the election. Usually it gets very little attention until it’s really too late to do anything about it.
It will be interesting to see what standard they come up with, and if it actually leads to a third (or fourth, or more) candidate being included in 2016. I do not think they’ll accept the 270+EV ballot access threshold as proposed by OAI, nor Change the Rule’s specific proposal to count ballot access petition signatures to aware the third podium. My guess is they’ll do something like: lower the polling threshold to 10%, or maybe a little lower but not lower than 7%, and/or require that the polls cited do include all candidates with sufficient ballot access, or something like that. That leaves it still more likely than not that only the Dem and GOP will meet the threshold, but they can also rebut many of the criticisms that have built up and possibly defuse a more radical solution, from the courts of the FEC, that would take the debates away from CPD altogether or tie their hands to including <1% candidates.
I'm skeptical and generally critical of Ackerman's pet project that gets reincarnated with a new name every couple of years, and its perpetual failure to deliver an actual candidate, and in particular I think the way AE-national screwed AE-Oklahoma out of giving their ballot access to Johnson/Gray was petty and stupid. But if this effort ends up putting enough pressure on CPD to force some change, even a modest one, that will be worthwhile. I just hope we don't end up in a situation where some designated-loser establishment centrist like Bloomberg gets to be on stage with Bush and Clinton, while the Libertarian is still excluded. It's debatable if that would even be an improvement.
Fahrenkopf expressed concern that a change could benefit wealthy candidates.
Translation: “We’re absolutely terrified by the prospect of another Ross Perot in ’92!”
Barry Donegan of Ben Swann’s site is also talking about this:
http://benswann.com/commission-on-presidential-debates-considers-ditching-15-rule-for-third-party-candidates/