If Donald Trump runs for president, he's on track to get in the early debates, while 2012 Iowa caucus winner Rick Santorum is not.
Now that Fox and CNN have
set the rules for inclusion in the first two Republican presidential debates, the flock of candidates who don't look set to make the grade have to figure out their strategies for clawing their way onstage. Inclusion will be based on national polling, with the top 10 candidates getting onto the debate stage. (The less-known or less-popular candidates will also get their own JV debate prior to the CNN debate in September, which should be
highly entertaining.) The use of national polling alone to get onstage up-ends campaign plans based on winning the early primary states. And while it's meant to identify candidates who have a shot at winning, Rick Santorum—who is currently below the 10-candidate threshold—
makes a good point:
"In January of 2012," he said at a conference in Oklahoma, "I was at 4 percent in the national polls, and I won the Iowa caucuses. I don't know if I was last in the polls, but I was pretty close to last."
The need to
get into the top 10 nationally may lead some lower-ranked candidates to campaign less in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina in order to try to raise their national profiles:
With national polls largely a function of name recognition, strategists working for various campaigns said they expected long-shot candidates to spend time in cable TV studios in New York that may instead have been used to meet voters at small events in Iowa or New Hampshire. Money that might have gone to build a campaign infrastructure in early states could instead be diverted to buying national TV ads.
Moreover, candidates traditionally have tried to time their campaigns to peak right at the time of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, scheduled this cycle for February. Now, candidates with low name recognition must try to build national profilesahead of the first primary debate, set for Aug. 6.
While normally you'd say that de-emphasizing the early states and their very particular interests is a good thing for the political process, the idea of a dozen or so fringy Republican presidential wannabes flooding the airwaves to the best of their ability is ... cringe-inducing, though possibly entertaining. Let's just say it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to help make the Republican primary
less of a shitshow and protect the party's eventual nominee from having to take positions unpalatable to general election voters. And remember, the current top 10 who would make it into the debates already includes Ben Carson and Donald Trump.