The Hotline has this commentary by John Fund about the CNN debate rules. Here is the text:
“CTUP Senior Fellow, John Fund, is featured in the Wall Street Journal today, discussing CNN’s decision to include Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the presidential debate, but not Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
RFK Jr. failed to be the first independent candidate to make a presidential debate stage in 32 years. CNN said he failed to meet their conditions for inclusion: he only hit a 15 percent level of support in three rather than the needed four national polls, and he wasn’t on enough state ballots to potentially win the presidency.
As a news organization, CNN executives say they have the right to set their own standards. But in the spirit of transparency and fairness they should answer questions about how far they stretched to accommodate the wishes of the major parties who wanted RFK Jr. to be excluded. The CNN debate created a Catch-22 that made it impossible for Kennedy or any alternative candidate to reach the debate stage:
In May, Donald Trump told Scripps News he had “no problem” with Kennedy joining the debate. But a Trump official told the Washington Post that a CNN producer had promised that “RFK will not be on the stage.”
A Biden adviser told Axios in May: “Our criteria for a 1:1 debate was made clear publicly, it was made clear to CNN and they understood our position when we accepted their offer.”
CNN has declined to answer media inquiries on details of their negotiations.
What we do know is that CNN’s criteria would have excluded independent Ross Perot, who did participate in the 1992 debates, because he was only on states with 119 electoral votes as of mid-June that year. Perot, who won 19 percent of the national vote in 1992, was finished petitioning in many more states by June of that year, but state election offices didn’t verify all of his signatures until mid-September.
Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, told me it is “irrational” to demand RFK meet a ballot access requirement because he has already filed signatures in states with 310 electoral votes and is almost certain to eventually be on all 50 state ballots.
Winger disagrees: “Actually, Trump and Biden aren’t currently on ANY state ballots because they haven’t even been nominated yet,” he says.
The now sidelined Commission on Presidential Debates, which ran every general-election debate between 1988 and this year agrees: “Until the conventions take place, we don’t know who the official nominees will be.”
There have been many times the two major parties colluded to exclude any outside voices from speaking directly to the American people. What’s different is that it now appears a media organization has cooperated with them.
The second and final presidential debate is now scheduled for September 10 on ABC, which hasn’t released its qualifying requirements. It has a chance to open up the process with fair rules, but few believe it will.
If RFK Jr is excluded from both debates that may be legal. But entrenching the two-party system also damages voters and the “democracy” that both major parties claim they are fighting to preserve.”
