The GOP will hold its next presidential primary debate a month from now—supposing Donald Trump, who has boycotted the first two, doesn’t get his way. Earlier this week, the former president once again called for the remaining events to be canceled—a move that would essentially declare him the nominee, in the eyes of the Republican National Committee, before a single primary vote has been cast. And while RNC leadership has said it will “continue to sanction debates” as long as there are candidates interested in taking the stage, party officials increasingly seem aware of their futility—unless Trump himself is up there.
“You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend these debates are going to result in someone other than Donald Trump getting the nomination,” as Patti Lyman, RNC national committeewoman for Virginia, told Politico of the “embarrassing” events the GOP has already held. “After the failure of the first debate,” added Tyler Bowyer, national committeeman from Arizona, “there should have been some severe introspection into what’s going on here.”
“I think the only way you salvage it is if you get the frontrunner there,” Bowyer said.
But Trump has had little reason to appear with his competitors: He leads his next closest challenger, the floundering Ron DeSantis, by more than 40 points in polls—and neither of the first two debates have done much to weaken his advantage. In fact, some polls have suggested Trump put his challengers even lower on the totem poll after the first two debates he skipped. His rivals, meanwhile, have struggled to land any punches on him, with the most aggressive—Chris Christie, hovering somewhere around two percent in polls—straining to get his “Donald Duck” nickname to stick. And the party already proved it has no leverage over him when he defied the loyalty pledge RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel put in front of the candidates. Why would Trump do anything differently going forward?
That leaves the GOP with a slate of debates that are unlikely to feature the dominant frontrunner and that some of the other candidates have even begun to criticize. “Another unhelpful debate in November is not an option,” Ben Yoho, CEO of Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign, told the RNC on Sunday, calling for only Trump’s top four challengers to be allowed on the stage. Christie and Tim Scott have also called for rule changes, with the latter proposing that the criteria be amended to give more weight to early primary state polling than national polls. But shrinking the debate stage, as Ramaswamy wants to do, or rearranging the podiums, as Scott is asking for, still wouldn’t address the biggest issue—the GOP clown-show is missing its ringmaster.
The party insists that the show—which lost a quarter of its viewership from the first episode to the second—must go on, even as the Trump campaign calls on the RNC to “refocus its manpower” on the general election. “We have rules,” Jason Thompson, Georgia’s national committeeman, told Politico. “We aren’t anointing people.” But that’s effectively what they’re doing if neither the party nor Trump’s challengers can make these debates meaningful.
Eric Lutz
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