In any cycle, a large number of people file paperwork with the Federal Election Committee to run for President or file paperwork with state election officials to get on a state ballot.  In 2016, eighty-three people filed to run for President as a Democrat and one hundred twenty filed to run for President as a Republican.  Most of these people, by any definition, are not “serious” candidates — they have no name recognition; they do not file in a significant number of states; and they do not raise the type of money needed to run a national campaign.   It is literally impossible to have all of these people participate in a “debate”  unless by debate, you mean simply having each candidate give a three or four minute stump speech introducing themselves or a multi-day endurance test that nobody would watch (other than to periodically check-in to see which candidates are making gaffes due to exhaustion).

Before most candidates had filed, the Democratic National Committee decided on certain ground rules for participation in its June and July debate.  First, and most significant, the DNC decided to hold its debate over two evenings with a maximum of ten candidates per evening.  (While, perhaps, three or evenings with a maximum of six to eight candidates would have been better, getting networks to agree to a two-day debate was an accomplishment.)  Second, the DNC established a series of objective standards to determine who would qualify.  These standards were facially neutral and did not have the DNC making a judgment call on whom they wanted to have in the debates.

Of course, when you go with “neutral” criteria, there will always be at least one surprise candidate who is able to meet them.  And, there will always be one candidate who surprisingly does not qualify who has a reason why those neutral rules actually are not fair.   By the end of May, twenty-four candidates who claimed to be serious candidates had filed to run for the Democratic nomination.  The field included (by highest office held):  one Vice-President; one former cabinet member; eight present or former Senators; three governors; six present or former U.S. Representatives; three mayors; and two who have never held elective office.  Each of these individuals can make an argument as to why they belong on the debate stage, but putting more candidates on the stage reduces the amount of time that each candidate has to make their points which in turn reduces the usefulness of the debate in providing meaningful information to prospective primary voters (and activists and donors) trying to pick a candidate.  It is difficult to pick any objective criteria based on the success of the campaigns to date that would not favor the candidates who announced earliest.  On the other hand, while you could use objective criteria that considered what candidates had done in past elections, any such criteria would clearly appear to be stacking the deck in favor of the DNC’s preferred model of a candidate.  So we have four candidates who missed qualifying for the June debate now having to play catch-up and hope to bump one of the other candidates from the July debate.

For those twenty who did qualify for the June debates, the DNC decided to use a semi-random process for assigning them to particular nights.  (The “semi” part came from separating the candidates with the top polling results into a separate “pot” from the remaining candidates with half of each grouping being drawn for each night.)  The hope was for two balanced nights, but randomness does not always work.  If you ranked the candidates by poll results, four of the top five ended up on the same night.  So, while there is not a “JV” or “Not Ready for Prime Time” debate, there is what looks like a “main” debate.  So what does the split mean.

For the June 26 debate, the top two candidates — Vice-president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders will not be present.  That poses a challenge for the candidates who will be there.  Option 1 will be to pretend that the two front-runners and contrast yourself to those two candidates.  Option 2 will be to pretend that the candidates on the second night are not in the race and contrast yourself to the other nine people on the stage (in the hopes of moving ahead of those candidates and making it to the August debate which might be only the top eight to ten candidates).  Of course, the challenge is different for the candidates in the June 27 debate.  For that debate, the candidates will want to draw contrasts with Biden and Sanders but without making the debate all about Biden and Sanders.  As we saw in 2016, making the debate all about one candidate allows that candidate to get all of the attention making it impossible for any other candidate to separate themselves from the field. 

Aside from the strategic decision of focus on Biden and Sanders versus focusing on your own agenda and qualifications, there will be the tougher task of saying something that makes you different.  Even in 2016, which was portrayed as having major disagreements between the top two candidates, the differences tended to be about the best way to move toward goals that both candidates supported — better healthcare, fairer wages, more affordable college, better job training programs, etc.  If the question is “should the wealthy pay more in taxes,” you will get ten hands raised very high.  But with an average of twelve minutes per candidate (maybe one minute to respond to a question), that is a very limited time to put forward the Castro or Warren or Harris or Biden solution to these issues. 

For most of these candidates, the need to make a big splash at these debates is crucial.  Making the August debates requires getting more donors and getting poll results over 2% (a standard that only eight candidates are currently meeting).  More importantly, by the time that Iowa rolls around, it will take 15% to actually win delegates.  While some candidates are beginning to approach 15% in early state polling, it is easy to see uncommitted (a/k/a “the field”) winning Iowa and only two or three candidates winning delegates in New Hampshire as long as the field stays over eight candidates.  If two candidates are combining for close to fifty percent, no more than three other candidates can qualify to win delegates in a given state or district.  In short, candidates need to start showing why they should be in the group of five or six that make it to New Hampshire.  If you can’t show voters why they should prefer Jay Inslee over John Hickenlooper or Tim Ryan, then you will probably not make it to Iowa. 

There are a lot of easy things that the candidates can say in two weeks.  Saying that Trump is a criminal who should be in prison is easy; that was true even before he ran for the White House.  What I and (I think) most voters are looking for are:  1) how do we clean up this mess; and 2) how do we do it knowing that Mitch McConnell will still be an obstructionist in the Senate — even as minority leader — like he was in 2009 and 2010.  We will see how these twenty candidates respond to that challenge (and how the four candidates who aren’t there try to put forward what they would have said if they had made the debates).