Are The Democratic Debates Already A Mess?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Republicans struggled with setting debate criteria during the 2016 presidential election because of their large and unwieldy field, and Democrats seem as though they’ll have their own issues in 2020. We already count 20 candidates who have qualified for the first two debates via one of the two criteria the Democratic National Committee has set up: receiving at least 1 percent in at least three qualifying polls or having 65,000 people donate to their campaign, with at least 200 donors in 20 different states.

The DNC has said that it will cap participation at 20 candidates, so the next candidate who qualifies, via one of the two criteria for entry, will trigger the tiebreaker rules. Those get complicated fast, but the topline is: If more than 20 candidates qualify, then meeting both the polling and donor requirements will be paramount for candidates — those who do will get first dibs on debate lecterns.

But why is it so hard to figure out a fair metric for inclusion? Is there a better way to determine who makes the debate stage?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): It’s difficult to figure out a fair metric for inclusion because the whole process is weird. Ideally, it’s both inclusive and efficient (i.e., it narrows options for a nominee relatively quickly), but it’s not really possible to do both at the same time.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Right, and in the aftermath of the 2016 Democratic nomination, when the DNC was criticized for “rigging” the debates for Hillary Clinton, the DNC really wants to seem transparent and inclusive.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So, 1) It’s good to have objective criteria, 2) as objective criteria go, fundraising and high-quality polling is perfectly fine, but 3) the DNC set the bar too low. Getting donations from 65,000 people is not that hard. And polling at 1 percent in any of three polls out of the many, many polls out there is even easier, probably.

sarahf: Although, to be clear, the DNC is not counting all polls from all pollsters. It has said, however, that it’ll consider both national and early-state polls, and qualifying polls can come from 18 different organizations).

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, it’s still pretty easy to qualify via three polls at 1 percent or more — 19 Democrats have already done that. However, if the DNC had set the threshold at 2 percent or more, just eight candidates would meet that mark.

Only 8 candidates are polling at 2 percent or more

Democratic presidential candidates by whether they have received at least 1 percent or 2 percent support in at least three polls that would qualify them for the first Democratic presidential debates, as of May 21, 2019

IN at least 3 DEBATE-QUALIFYING POLLS, HAS SUPPORT OF …


Candidate
1 percent or more
2 percent or more




Joe Biden
✓
✓


Cory Booker
✓
✓


Pete Buttigieg
✓
✓


Kamala Harris
✓
✓


Amy Klobuchar
✓
✓


Beto O’Rourke
✓
✓


Bernie Sanders
✓
✓


Elizabeth Warren
✓
✓


Steve Bullock
✓



Julian Castro
✓



Bill de Blasio
✓



John Delaney
✓



Tulsi Gabbard
✓



Kirsten Gillibrand
✓



John Hickenlooper
✓



Jay Inslee
✓



Tim Ryan
✓



Eric Swalwell
✓



Andrew Yang
✓



Michael Bennet




Seth Moulton




Marianne Williamson

For candidates deemed “major” by FiveThirtyEight.

Sources: Polls, Media reports

natesilver: Yeah, hitting 1 percent is soooooooooo easy. Like people can literally just pick your name at random almost.

The DNC is spending too much time trying to avoid mistakes they think were made in the previous Democratic nomination process when there are probably more lessons to be learned from the Republican nomination process.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, part of what the DNC wanted to avoid was the mistakes the Republicans made in the 2016 cycle with prime time and undercard debates.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I think the Democrats have already done a better job than Republicans did in 2016. The DNC has said that they’ll randomly distribute candidates across the nights, rather than hold “varsity” and “junior varsity” debates. I think that’s a good move.

natesilver: Oh, I’m not sure I agree with that, Nathaniel.

nrakich: How is a junior varsity debate better, Nate? My problem with splitting the candidates up by tier is that it requires splitting hairs between a candidate who gets, say, 3 percent in a poll and a candidate who gets 4 percent. (Margins of error are real!) I guess it’s fine to argue that you think the threshold should be higher and there should be only one main debate, but if you are going to split the candidates into two debates, I think randomly doing it is the only good way.

natesilver: Well, if you wind up stuck in the JV debate because you poll at 2 percent rather than at 3 percent, I don’t have much sympathy for you, even though that’s a minor difference.

nrakich: But the debates are candidates’ chance to raise their polling numbers up from that 2 or 3 percent.

Debates should start off inclusive but probably get less inclusive as we get closer to voting.

Like, the New Hampshire debate three days before the primary should probably only have the candidates with a serious chance of winning that primary.

nrakich: My beef with using polling averages as a debate criterion is that they assume that candidates can be precisely ranked by their standing in the polls. But in reality, polls are imprecise instruments, and you can’t do much more than lump candidates into rough categories (and even those have fuzzy boundaries). For example, all candidates polling between 0 and 5 percent are basically in the same spot.

julia_azari: I agree with Nathaniel here. I would also add that these differences don’t, in my mind, clearly differentiate candidates. And does it really matter if it’s 20 or 22 candidates on the stage? Either isolate the top-tier candidates or let everyone in.

sarahf: Julia, the number of evenings we have to devote to watching the debates is at stake!

julia_azari: If other people haven’t blocked off all of 2019 and 2020 to watch debates, that’s not my problem. People want an open nomination process. This is where that goes.

nrakich: Some pollsters have also said that they are uncomfortable with their work influencing elections. Their role is as measurers, not active participants.

natesilver: Meh, the pollsters complain too much.

If you believe in the quality of your poll, you shouldn’t have any problem with it being used as an objective metric.

I think they should literally have tiers on stage based on where you’re polling.

nrakich: Nate