The CNN Republican presidential debate of September 16 was supposed to be two hours long. But once it got started, it was so useful in portraying the views of the eleven candidates that CNN decided to extend it to three hours. It was closer to being a true debate than the August FOX debate had been. It is now as clear as anything that a debate with a large number of candidates can be successful. After tonight, there simply is no coherent argument for general election debates that only include the two major party nominees.
As mentioned here before, in all U.S. history, there has never been a presidential election in which more than seven candidates had enough presidential elector candidates to theoretically win the election.
UPDATE: the debate was watched by 23,000,000 viewers. See this story. That is the most-watched CNN program ever. Thanks to PoliticalWire for that link.
correct Richard
Getting many candidates together for a debate is very primitive and simplistic compared to many candidates getting together to elect decision-items and a Cabinet.
It’s this sort of thinking that has kept progress back and destroyed any unifying potential in pluralistic elections.
The 9th USA Parliament has been using a unifying voting system for twenty consecutive years, and we will never go back to debates, among pluralists. We have never considered such an idea because working together is far more powerful than fussing, fighting and trying to prove that you are better than everyone else. That simply doesn’t work in teamwork.
The 9th USA Parliament features seventeen candidates for US President and two candidates for county supervisor NOW. Today. Not as an after thought or after “debates” among pluralists, and nobody has it better than our team:
http://www.usparliament.org
We are not trapped by plurality elections; the censorious, divisive manners and archaic static initiatives by power-grabbers and the debates that the pluralists seek.
We moved past that more than twenty years ago and will never go back.
Now there is a an international level entity for such unity too, we are sponsoring the International Parliament and we need not support the insider ways of pluralists:
http://international-parliament.org/
It isn’t a matter of whether the debates can or cannot work from a technical perspective, all that matters is the ability to control the narrative. The narrative is all that matters. In this case, the narrative is sufficiently served with a large number of candidates from the same party. However, when it comes to the general election debates the narrative the Democratic and Republican parties want to tell is not served by expanding the debates to include other candidates.
How about a 2016 Prez winner with 20 (repeat 20) percent of the popular votes ???
Abolish the timebomb Electoral College.
The debates then would include ALL of the left/right robot hacks —
i.e. having Trump and Clinton and Sanders would be fine entertainment / terrorism in action.
—
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
Now about 320 million folks in the USA including the alleged 11 million plus ILLEGAL invader folks.
About 140 million voters in Nov. 2016 ???
How many folks have a life or death urge to see the Elephant debates on tape or in a transcript ???
WHO remembers ANY of the 2008 or 2012 debates ???