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Fourth Free and Equal Elections Presidential Debate: Discussion and Open Thread

The Free and Equal Elections Foundation will host its fourth and final presidential debate of the 2024 cycle in Los Angeles, California, this Wednesday. The debate will feature Libertarian nominee Chase Oliver, Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein, and Constitution Party nominee Randall Terry.

F&E founder Christina Tobin will co-moderate the debate along with former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. The debate will begin at 5:00 PM PST. To qualify for participation, candidates had to be constitutionally eligible to serve as President and had either secured ballot access in enough states to mathematically win a majority of Electoral College votes or polled at two percent or higher in a national poll.

Seven candidates were originally invited to attend under this criteria, according to the Free and Equal Elections Foundation. They are Libertarian Chase Oliver, Green Jill Stein, Constitution Party nominee Randall Terry, Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee Claudia De la Cruz, and independent Dr. Cornel West. Readers can access a stream of the debate below once it begins:

Independent Political Report, along with Outsider Media Foundation, is a member of Free and Equal’s Open Debates Coalition. Consistent with our belief that American voters benefit from having more choices and our mission to provide a grassroots platform for news and information on third party and independent candidate activity, we are hosting an open thread to give readers the opportunity to share their thoughts on the debate.

Independent Political Report kindly reminds participating readers to adhere to the site’s discussion and civility policies. Our editorial team reserves the right to remove any content that violates these policies, as well as any irrelevant or spam comments, at its discretion.

26 Comments

  1. Nuña October 26, 2024
  2. Unimportant October 25, 2024

    WZ, we have a point of agreement on Biden and Harris. I don’t miss the Bushes and Clinton’s and I do miss Reagan and (hopefully not for long) Trump.. and this is a common view among my family, friends, and neighbors. I do agree that Trump can be quite incoherent and inconsistent.

  3. Nuña October 25, 2024

    Ronald Reagan is overrated, from a (paleo)libertarian/ancap perspective, but he is still the best president the US has had since Calvin Coolidge. Whereas Trump is even more overrated. He made the right noises but then never acted on them, instead breaking his promises and betraying his voters again and again.

    Trump has been like voting for Calvin Coolidge and electing Woodrow Wilson. I don’t regret voting for him in 2016, because he deserved a chance and there was no way of knowing how he would do. But I do regret voting for him again in 2020. I could have and should have known better by then. And the Constitution Party had fielded a better candidate that time around.

  4. Walter Ziobro October 25, 2024

    “I find Trump to have been the best president since at least Reagan and in many ways better.”

    Seriously? I think Reagan was one of the best, but Trump is one of the worst. Reagan had consistency and coherence. Trump has little coherence, and is consistent mainly in what helps Trump.

  5. Unimportant October 25, 2024

    Well, we disagree. That’s fine. I find Trump to have been the best president since at least Reagan and in many ways better.

    I guess I’ll just resign to not knowing whether you think anything besides the logic component of verbal presentation is important or not.

  6. Walter Ziobro October 25, 2024

    Unimportant asked:

    “Do you agree that Trump is better than Harris, Biden, the Clinton’s, Obama’s and the Bushes?”

    Frankly, I think Trump, Biden and Harris are all WORSE than Obama, Clinton and the Bushes. I used to despise the Bushes and Clintons: now i actually miss them.

  7. Unimportant October 25, 2024

    So, you base it solely on verbal presentation. I guess I’ll be left wondering whether you think those other things I mentioned, and other factors I didn’t, even matter. Do you agree that Trump is better than Harris, Biden, the Clinton’s, Obama’s and the Bushes?

  8. Walter Ziobro October 25, 2024

    @ Unimportant::

    Terry gives reasons, with historical and constitutional arguments for his positions. Trump mostly just rants, and makes ad hominem attacks on his opponents.

  9. Unimportant October 24, 2024

    Walter Z,

    I’ve always thought so, too. I’m wondering why you think so only to see if our reasons match. I’m also wondering if you think being rational is the only thing that matters to the exclusion of other considerations such as ability to connect with average voters, ability to win, fire in the belly, etc. I don’t believe being the most rational and most conservative are the only things that matter, although all things otherwise being equal I’d prefer a candidate who is more rational and more conservative than others.

  10. Unimportant October 24, 2024

    Stewart,

    Thank you for the review. I already knew I’m not going to vote, and even if I did vote I’d vote very unenthusiastically for Trump, who will easily have my States electors without me (nothing down ballot is any more suspenseful), so I wasn’t going to watch for that reason. But maybe now I might just to rubber neck at a train wreck. I hope it’s every bit as awful as you have led me to believe it is if I do.

  11. Walter ZIobro October 24, 2024

    Terry is a more rational conservative than Trump.

  12. Stewart Flood October 24, 2024

    I’m not going to speak to the answers the candidates gave. I watched the first hour of the debate, or rather I guess you should call it “talent show,” that Tobin and her foundation put on tonight. Considering how many years she has been doing this, it was a complete disgrace. The production quality was horrible. You could hear and see things that they really did not want you to observe.

    I think the best example of how bad this was was when during one of the candidates response they cut the camera to Tobin so that we could watch her trying to put her earpiece back in. Yes. The quality is that bad. The first 30 minutes of the recording can just be skipped unless you want to hear someone — I believe it was Chase Oliver — discuss getting pizza after the event and not talking very long to media, or other fun things that I am sure they did not want us to hear. Again, they did not want us to hear it, but we did. Why didn’t they edit that out? Or just before the second or third “singer“, when you could clearly hear one of the moderator saying to the other that he wasn’t going to clap. Of course, after the abysmal performance, Tobin challenged her cohort on how “wonderful”:the performance was. He obviously found it uncomfortable to answer.

    I agree with the comments about the entertainers and about Tobin’s inability to identify talent. They were not entertaining. Tobin is a clueless hack. This was pitiful. This was so bad that it would not even qualify for a local cable access channel after midnight in the 1970s.

    So after wasting an hour watching this pitiful event, I turned it off. I was trying to watch it to get an idea of whether any of them were worth voting for. The simple fact that they showed up for this event makes it clear that none of them are. I am so glad I did not recommend this event to anyone I consider a friend. I would certainly never donate to this “foundation”.

  13. Nuña October 23, 2024

    Incomprehensible that anyone would insult Russia by calling this Stein demon a Russian agent. Poor Dugin and Putin being mentioned in the same breath as it.

    Hello, Colin Chemtrail the founder of Nexus IO, instead of blathering about whatever you are trying to blathering about right now and blowing your nose into the microphone, could you perhaps try and fix your voting app so it isn’t one big privacy violation that’s easy to manipulate.

    Terry: “I don’t want 100 or 200 people on the ballot, but I’d take that over the strangle-hold the two-party system has on ballot access.”
    Why? The more, the merrier. Let’s crowd the ballot out the wazoo. Until representative democracy collapses in favor of direct, real democracy.

    Tenth talent show thingy: I just mentioned Jimi Hendrix. And well, this is almost exactly Jimi Hendrix’ abuse of the Star Spangled Banner. It’s not good, but at least this one isn’t trying to “sing”, making it more bearable than all the previous ones, except maybe – just maybe! – Rumi lady.

    I was right: Stein didn’t manage to not go overtime and have her mic cut even one single time throughout. What an achievement.
    And Oliver this time around, also managed to do so multiple times.

    I already knew Christina Tobin is not a good public speaker. But apparently she is also not a good thinker either. And she has absolutely no eye – or rather, no ear – for talent.

    This whole debate has been an unmitigated disaster. They have improved exactly zero of the problems with the previous debate, and they have managed to make most of them worse.

    Thanks for the laughs and winces, this was an affront to God and all His Creation.

  14. Nuña October 23, 2024

    No, Chase, “the reason people are driven to the Republican and Democratic Parties” is because the supposed “alternatives” are nazi-loving scumbags like you and Stein – interchangeable with Trump and Harris 99% of the time and worse than them the other 1%.

    Sixth musical intermezzo. You would think they’ve hit rock-bottom by now and things could only get better at this point, but apparently you’d be wrong. Imagine if they actual bothered to put someone on the stage who has any talent…

    Chase “raise taxes on the rich” Oliver seems to have forgotten what label he is running under, albeit in name only.

    Stein: ‘drilling causes hurricanes, droughts and forest fires’. LMAO! She claims to be the climate-savvy candidate, but is more scientifically illiterate than your average toddler.

    Another diversity token with a terrible mic. I think he said he was “Mayan timekeeper” – 12/21/2012 end of the world, never forget – but he’s hard to hear.
    Wow, they just cut him off even worse than the shaolin monk chappy.

    Yeah, go Terry, call progressive income tax out for what it is! Progressive tax is even more immoral than regressive tax, flat tax is the least offensive and it still is theft.

    Seventh “talent” show entry. At least it isn’t tokenism. It’s merely meh.

    F&E deleting comments in Rumble chat. LOL. Not the antisemitism though, nor the promotion of infanticide… Funny how that works, isn’t it.

    Tobin. Sister. Nobody cares about your talentless freak-show, no matter how “indie” they are. Get them out of here, they don’t belong in a presidential debate. It’s an insult to the debaters and to the audience.

    Eighth time-waster: If you identify yourself as a “first nations Canadian woman” you are being insultingly dishonest with yourself and everyone else. Your ancestors – my ancestors – are the ones who wiped out the actual first nations millennia ago with our pre-civilized barbarism.
    “Dedicated to the children of ‘Palestine’.” Oh fuck off! And God damn the “children of ‘Palestine'” to eternal perdition.

    More hot mic-ing to introduce the ninth insult to art: Some moaning black man and some shouting black man. Very cringe.
    Shouty boi seems to think he’s Jimi Hendrix or something. Spoiler: he’s not.

  15. Nuña October 23, 2024

    The Hollywood shaolin monk forgot to tuck his shirt collar underneath his robes. Or to set up his mic so it doesn’t pick up the wind better than his voice. Or to set up his camera and green screen so it doesn’t blur the edges of his head and make him look AI-generated. “His eminence”? This is supposed to be some actual luminary rather than an actor or con-artist? Perhaps an introduction would have been in order.

    Terry killed it on abortion – pardon the pun, the genocide of innocents is serious business.

    Stein is perpetuating the debunked lie about a non-existent “increase in mortality due to repealing Roe v. Wade”.

    Fifth musical performance, fifth instance of DEI tokenism. Perhaps I was too hard on Rumi lady, she at least had some content, even if the presentation was underwhelming not to say off-putting.

    Terry gives a good answer about “Gaza”, but is both too harsh on pure Islam and not harsh enough on nazi “Palestine”. No, terrorists getting killed is not “a horrible loss of life”. The only good nazi terrorist is a dead nazi terrorist. From the river to the sea, Israel shall be free of “Palestinians”.

    Stein and her audience plants embarrassing themselves with their support for genocide of Jews and occupation of Israel. Surprise, surprise. Those people should be kicked out for disrupting the debate. Fucking nazi scum.

    Oliver gives his usual double-standard nazi apologetics and antisemitic denial of Jews right to defend themselves. No surprise there. What a fascist fraud.

  16. Nuña October 23, 2024

    Audience being picked up on the mics too well, like last debate. Looking at my feedback from last debate, the only mistake they haven’t repeated yet is talking over their sponsor – that I noticed, at least.

    I wonder if Stein will manage to not get her mic turned off even once throughout the course of the debate. I’m starting to think probably not.

    Terry has Oliver and Stein on the run regarding illegal immigration and border security.

    Oh boy, we’ve got some sort of “hotep” (Nubians=Native Americans who built the pyramids, conquered the Nile and the Mississippi, and all such rot) dressed up as a red skin using Hawaiian greetings, hoping to “inspire young people to use their imagination” – presumably like he is doing right now – infantilizing the audience, and mocking “prayer” – “hebrews and shebrews”, really?!

  17. Nuña October 23, 2024

    Terry is also tripping over his words more than last time. He’s giving good answers again, but not presenting them as smoothly.

    Stein keeps going over time again and having her mic muted, just like last time.

    Oliver is again disingenuously making the right noises and lacking the body language to sell them. Used. Car. Salesman.

    This really is shaping up to just be an all-round inferior rerun of the last Free & Equal Election Debate.

    Fourth musical number: they are hot micing over it and forgot to turn on the singers mic. Probably for the best.

    “Thank you for that performance, we enjoyed it very much.” – David Walker, clearly not enjoying it… XD

    This is gloriously cringe.

  18. Nuña October 23, 2024

    Chase Oliver seems more flustered than last time: talking fast, tripping over his words more often, losing his train of thought, appears sweaty and shaky.

    I’ve enjoyed reading some of Rumi’s poetry in translation, but I’ve never heard it sung before and I’m not sure I want to again. Still better than the national anthem though.

    And just to be clear, I’m not tearing the anthem singer slipping up and asking to start over etc., I’m talking about the whole weird ass discordant arrangement that she chose to perform in the first place.

    And Rumble’s first crash.

    And a breakdown in communication between moderators and backstage, leads to third singing break:
    “You can do what you want to, but I’m not going to clap for this” – David Walker on hot mic U+1F923

    “This is the first time we brought music into the debate” – Christina Tobin

    Yes, and please get it back out. It clearly doesn’t belong here. This is a presidential debate, not America’s Got Talent.

  19. Nuña October 23, 2024

    Unbelievable. They’re doing it again as if they learned nothing from last time – the same mistakes, but somehow worse: Technical issues. Hot mics. Talking over each other. A horrible artsy and experimental rendition of the national anthem – this is worse than Ingrid Andress.

  20. Nuña October 23, 2024

    That’s a good point. Ayyadurai (314) could be disqualified under F&E’s requirement that the candidate be eligible to serve as president. And Kennedy (309) might not have been invited because expressed a desire to suspend his campaign. But why was Sonski not invited despite having access to 396 EVs?

  21. The_E October 23, 2024

    @X Sonski has no path to 270, and Ayyudarai is constitutionally ineligible

  22. X October 23, 2024

    Then Sonski and Ayyudarai would also qualify.

  23. Nuña October 23, 2024

    I suspect you may be forgetting about write-in ballot access. West has can in theory win up to 358 EVs, and de la Cruz up to 463 EVs. Terry only has access to 181 EVs, so he must be polling at 2% or more somewhere.

  24. Observer October 23, 2024

    There’s a poll out there that has Terry and de la Cruz at 2%? West’s not as surprising, he’s been included in a fair number. But none of those three have over 270 EV ballot access. But I haven’t seen one even include Con. and PSL.

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