The CNN Republican presidential debate of September 16 was supposed to be two hours long. But once it got started, it was so useful in portraying the views of the eleven candidates that CNN decided to extend it to three hours. It was closer to being a true debate than the August FOX debate had been. It is now as clear as anything that a debate with a large number of candidates can be successful. After tonight, there simply is no coherent argument for general election debates that only include the two major party nominees.
As mentioned here before, in all U.S. history, there has never been a presidential election in which more than seven candidates had enough presidential elector candidates to theoretically win the election.
UPDATE: the debate was watched by 23,000,000 viewers. See this story. That is the most-watched CNN program ever. Thanks to PoliticalWire for that link.
The only point here is that having 10 and 11 candidates on one stage has not been entirely unmanageable.
Lack of good questions. Lack of comparison generation. use of debate to steer public to particular candidates. These were all bad.
I didn’t watch the debate, but so far most of what I’ve heard has been criticism of the debate format, its length, lack of substantive questions, etc.
In terms of logistically being able to accommodate a large number of candidates, and attracting and holding a large audience. Yes, it’s a success.
This has nothing to do with how good the individual candidates or their policy positions (or lack thereof) may be.
It depends on what you mean by success.
Claims that the Republican crock was a success are somewhat bizarre.
It may not be an ideal solution, but the “minor-league” debate prior to the main one may be a format that could strike a balance. Use absolutely objective standards (on enough ballots to potentially win) to get into the debates, and then the less concrete methods (such as polls) can be used to who gets into the main event, with clear rules as to how one can raise up into or relegated down from it, in subsequent events.
The rise of Carly Fiorina in the GOP debates serves as an example of how this would work (though it took some tweaking of the rules by CNN to allow for this.)
At the very least this shows a framework that could serve as a template if current lawsuits against the Presidential Debates Commission could be settled on.
The Republicans and Democrats can handle 10 or more candidates in a debate when it is just the candidates for their presidential nomination, but they can’t have more than two candidates when it comes to the general election. This shows their hypocrisy.