There’s No Good Reason to Keep RFK Jr. Off the Debate Stage
Tonight’s the night: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will faceoff on the debate stage—though they might spend more time arguing with the moderators than with each other. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are slated to grill the candidates, whose microphones will be muted when it’s the other person’s turn to speak. This means Trump and Biden won’t be able to talk over each other—a good thing, broadly speaking—but they may not be able to engage in much cross-chatter at all.
Under such conditions, the debate might simply feel like two separate interviews, with the candidates fielding different questions from the moderators and interacting very little. Only time will tell.
That said, the most serious problem with this first debate is that it’s missing a candidate: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose independent bid for the presidency has attracted a non-negligible base of support. There is no good reason to exclude RFK JR. from the debate—the voters deserve to hear from him, too.
Arguments that RFK Jr. has failed to garner significantly high poll numbers to justify inclusion in the debate ring especially hollow this year, given that Biden, Trump, and CNN have agreed to throw out the rule book. Indeed, for the first time in my lifetime (i.e., since 1988), the Commission on Presidential Debates—the nonprofit group that organizes the debates—is out of the picture.
Libertarians will recall the commission’s rules stated that candidates were eligible to appear in the debate if they had cleared a 15 percent support threshold in presidential polls. This meant that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, was absent from the Trump-Clinton debates—despite receiving 13 percent approval in some polls.
There’s nothing sacred about the 15 percent figure; it’s an arbitrarily determined hurdle to clear. Having bucked the commission, the candidates and the network could have come up with different rules. They’ve certainly agreed to do some things differently: the aforementioned microphone situation, no live audience, an earlier-than-anticipated debate date, etc.
But, no. CNN announced last week that RFK Jr. had failed to meet the network’s criteria: at least 15 percent in four reputable polls and ballot qualification in enough states to theoretically win 270 electoral votes. The Kenn
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