The Rules Help Frontrunners in Both Parties, not just Trump

Invisible Primary: Visible -- Thoughts on the invisible primary and links to the goings on of the moment as 2024 approaches...

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Elaine Kamarck had a really good piece up over at Brookings late last week. Breaking the nomination process timeline into three parts -- invisible primary, early contests and everything -- could perhaps use another layer, the opening of the winner-take-all window on March 15, but that is a small quibble. The hypothesis that someone will have to trip Trump up in one of the early states to take him down is a sound one as well. 

But FHQ breaks with Kamarck on an earlier section she penned...

"A few months ago, I helped create the now conventional wisdom which says that a large field of challengers will help Trump because the Republican winner-take-all or winner-take-most delegate selection rules are tailor made for a candidate who holds a solid base among primary voters and who can wrack up a series of plurality wins."

First of all, this is not exactly wrong. Winner-take-all rules certainly would not hurt a frontrunner with a built-in base of support like Trump seems to have. However, that is not the only layer of the rules that might help. There is another facet of the delegate selection process in both parties that could also help frontrunners in a similar position: the qualifying threshold. After all, candidates in both parties have to receive a minimum amount of support to gain any delegates in the first place. It is a standard 15 percent across all states, territories and jurisdictions in the Democratic process, and although it varies on the Republican side, the qualifying threshold can be no higher than 20 percent. In fact, more Republican state parties moved toward the 20 percent maximum qualifying threshold for the 2020 cycle. That remnant from the changes for the last cycle will potentially benefit the former president as well. 

But it is not just Trump who is helped by such rules. Frontrunners of all stripes can reap the benefits of a qualifying threshold. Here is an example. Say Trump wins 40 percent of the vote in the Minnesota primary on Super Tuesday next year. Ron DeSantis comes in a distant second at 20 percent, enough to qualify for delegates under the proportional rules Minnesota Republicans used in 2020. Trump in that scenario falls below 50 percent, so the winner-take-all trigger is not activated. Yet, only he and DeSantis qualify for delegates. Only their collective vote counts in calculating how many delegates each is allocated. Trump would not receive 40 percent of the delegates. The former president would claim two-thirds of them. DeSantis would take the remaining third. While that is not all of the delegates going to Trump, it would be a fairly healthy net delegate advantage coming out of the state. And if replicated across other states on a Super Tuesday with a number of primaries and caucuses, the delegate count could get lopsided quickly.

And this is not just a Republican phenomenon. This very thing happened to Joe Biden on Super Tuesday in 2020. Yes, some of his competition dropped out after South Carolina (and before Super Tuesday) and endorsed the former vice president, but they were still on the ballot, gobbling up votes and hovering well below the qualifying threshold. Who was above it? Biden, Bernie Sanders and a revolving cast of characters who nudged above 15 percent barrier across the slew of Super Tuesday states. The result was that Biden built a large enough lead in the delegate count to pressure others to cease campaign operations thereafter. 

Look, this is not all just delegate selection rules. As Seth Masket pointed out last week, winnowing matters a great deal in all of this. But the fact remains that it is not just winner-take-all rules that help just Trump. The delegate selection rules in both parties help frontrunners. Kamarck is not wrong, but her hypothesis is a bit too narrowly crafted. 

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The Republican National Committee late last week also released the qualifying criteria for the first presidential debate this August in Milwaukee. Some candidates are already complaining. Others are too:

“It seems that the RNC is going out of its way to purposely narrow the field at one of the earliest times in the party’s history,” said a Republican consultant working for one of the presidential candidates who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “And rather than finding a way for as many conservative voices to be heard by Republicans throughout the country, they are attempting to make this a two-man race.”

The RNC was going to catch some flak on this decision regardless, but this is much more about one candidate -- a dominant former president as frontrunner -- than it is about squelching the others struggling to gain support. How much lower than topping one percent in the polls was the national party supposed to go? The donor threshold is lower at 40,000 than it was for Democrats in their first debate four years ago. And Democrats managed to have 20 qualifiers across two debates on consecutive nights. The difference is not those on the low end. This is about the someone at the top end of polling crowding others out of a debate in which he may not even participate. 

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Invisible Primary quick hits:

• In the endorsement primary, former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam threw his support behind South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.
• Never Back Down, the super PAC aligned with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, started canvassing in New Hampshire, continuing to test the effectiveness of the practice outside of a traditional campaign.
• Granite state Rep. James Spillane flipped his endorsement from Trump to DeSantis. [There has been some early churn in the endorsement primary between these two among state legislators. That may or may not be a story, but it signals that both sides are seemingly (and intensely) battling for the support of this subset of elected officials (especially in early states.]
• And action (or inaction) over in Iowa may help explain why state legislators are so sought after: Republicans elected statewide are for the most part staying neutral for now. That is true in Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire. South Carolina is the exception. Trump has endorsements from the governor and senior senator.

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On this date...

...in 1972, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty withdrew from the Democratic presidential nomination race on the eve of the California primary.

...in 1984, in a series of five contests to end primary season, Colorado Senator Gary Hart won the delegate vote in California and primaries in New Mexico and South Dakota. Former Vice President Walter Mondale claimed victories in New Jersey and West Virginia.

...in 2012, both former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama swept primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. Obama also took the caucuses in North Dakota.

...in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in Puerto Rico.

...in 2020, President Donald Trump won an online vote among Republican party leaders in Puerto Rico to take all of the delegates from the territory.

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The National Parties and the Sanctioning of Presidential Primary Debates

Invisible Primary: Visible -- Thoughts on the invisible primary and links to the goings on of the moment as 2024 approaches...

First, over at FHQ Plus...

• Efforts are under way during the final week of the 2023 General Assembly to resurrect the presidential primary in Missouri for 2024. All the details at FHQ Plus.

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In Invisible Primary: Visible today...

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It was not necessarily hidden yesterday, but the news that the Republican National Committee (RNC) was floating tentative debate criteria for the first presidential debate this coming August quickly got shunted to the side in the wake of civil trial decisions and upcoming New Hampshire town halls. But the basic outlines of a debate qualifications regime from the RNC offered a glimpse into the continually evolving role the national parties play and have played in sanctioning primary debates over the last several cycles. 

After all, it was not that long ago that debates had already started at this point in earlier cycles. Democrats debated during the first week in May in 2003. Republicans did the same in 2007 and also held a debate with a truncated group of candidates during the first week in May 2011. However, it was that cycle, the 2012 cycle, that served as the straw that broke the camel's back. In all, there were 20 Republican presidential primary debates that cycle, highlighted by two debates from New Hampshire on successive days in January 2012 before the primary in the Granite state. There were a lot of debates and both during and after the general election of 2012, the sense was that all of that exposure had not necessarily helped the party's cause. That sentiment was borne out in the party's Growth and Opportunity Project report -- the so-called Autopsy. It cited the need for national party oversight of the debates process; that state parties, competing with one another for candidate attention, were partnering with media outlets to schedule debates. In turn, that led to a proliferation of the forums.  

The result was that the RNC empaneled a standing committee devoted to the sanctioning of presidential primary debates for the 2016 cycle. And that committee cut down on the number of sanctioned debates, prohibited candidates from participating in any unsanctioned debates and further scrutinized media partners for those debates. But because so many candidates threw their hats in the ring in 2015, the standing committee that cycle also had to wrestle with the various formats to present all of those candidates. The size of the field demanded some qualifications but also balancing that against the need to at the very least appear inclusive to any and all candidates with demonstrated support in public opinion polls. The initial solution was to hold two debates, a main event for candidates with 3 percent or more support in polls and an undercard for those under that threshold. 

Fast forward to the 2020 cycle and it was the Democratic Party that was faced with similar issues. Like Republicans four years earlier, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)  had a wide open nomination race that attracted a slew of candidates. And like their Republican counterparts, the party was coming off a general election defeat in the previous and dealing with complaints about the debate process during the primaries that cycle. While the Democratic nomination race was open in 2016, there was a prohibitive favorite and the incentives to develop a structure similar to what the RNC had devised were not as apparent. However, seeking to avoid a repeat in 2020, the DNC adopted a debates qualifying strategy similar to but modified from the 2016 RNC process. 

The innovation the DNC added for the 2020 cycle was to tweak the qualifications. Not only did the party initially set a polling threshold that candidates had to hit (an average of at least one percent in DNC-approved surveys), but to further, or more clearly, demonstrate widespread support, candidates also had to have at least 65,000 individual donors across at least 20 states (minimum 200 donors from each). However, the supply of candidates, even at those thresholds, was still sufficiently large enough to force two debates. Yet, rather than an undercard and a main event series of debates on the same night, the DNC instead split the debates across two nights and randomly selected participants from the entire qualified pool. 

Just as was the case for Republicans in 2016, the Democratic Party in 2019-20 had to devise a system aimed at a moving target. In both cases, the parties felt compelled to set minimum qualifying standards for debates, but did not want to set them so high as to prevent candidates with some support (and some likelihood of catching on with the voting public in the future) from participating. For better or worse, everyone having a shot in the process is a notion that both parties have nurtured throughout the post-reform era. And that dovetails nicely with primary scheduling as well. Both parties like what the Growth and Opportunity Project report in 2013 called the "on-ramp" to the heart of primary season (basically a lead up to Super Tuesday). The idea of the little guy being able to compete in and do the sort of grassroots-building retail politics in small states that can potentially lead to primary wins (and maybe the nomination) is an ideal that is part of the fabric of the process in both parties. 

Moreover, it is also something that is layered into the proposed RNC debate qualification rules for 2024 that are now making the rounds. Initially, those levels would be set quite low, just one percent support in polls and 40,000 unique donors. Left unanswered at this stage is whether the RNC, like the DNC in 2019-20, will approve the polls that determine qualification or if a candidate's donor base has to be dispersed across a set minimum of states. It also goes without saying that those barriers to debate entry are lower than what the DNC utilized just four years ago. 

And there is a reason for that. The field is different. In many ways the 2024 Republican field is akin to the 2016 Democratic field in that there is a clear frontrunner -- a former president, no less -- who has had some impact on the number of prospective candidates willing to enter. Now, clearly the field looks poised to grow in the coming weeks, so there will likely be supply for a robust debate, but perhaps not enough to require a second debate (on the same or subsequent night). Very simply, Trump is gobbling up too large a share of support (at this point) for the number of qualifying candidates to create a need for a second debate, undercard or otherwise.

But that is the moving target with which the national parties have to contend. They not only have to balance the need to be inclusive to candidates with some measure of support, but they also weigh thresholds that to create a robust debate without opening up the floodgates. Yet, this is a role the national parties have taken on in recent cycles when it took on the responsibility of sanctioning presidential primary debates in the first place. But first thing first, the RNC has to formalize the debate qualifications for 2024.

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DeSantis quick hits: 

• In the endorsement primary, DeSantis picked up another congressional endorsement from Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), someone Never Back Down (the DeSantis-aligned super PAC) founder Ken Cuccinelli called "one of the 'first five' that got us great rules in the House..." Good was in fact one of the McCarthy holdouts in the January speaker election. And as an aside, that group has been fairly active in the endorsement primary. Of the 20 who, on one speaker vote or another, opposed McCarthy, 11 have endorsed in the presidential race. Eight of those are behind Trump with two more counted as DeSantis supporters. Nikki Haley rolled out a Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) endorsement on launch day. 
• Never Back Down also won the support of former Trump adviser, Steve Cortes. Together, the staff primary and endorsement primary continue to offer evidence of an erosion of Trump support, but only to a point. As always, the former president in 2023 is behind the pace he set as an incumbent in 2019 but well ahead of where he was in 2015. 
• In a signal of what may soon be coming in terms of a presidential run, the Florida governor also on Tuesday decoupled from Friends of DeSantis. It is a move that is likely a precursor to freeing up the money in the committee for use in a presidential bid. 

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Viewed through one lens, it is curious that Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) would call on President Biden to break the DNC rules for 2024 and file to be on the New Hampshire primary ballot even if, as expected, the state goes rogue and holds a primary too early next year. If Khanna is behind the president, as he suggests he is, then why not call on New Hampshire Democrats to come up with an alternative to selecting delegates through a rogue primary? However, viewed through a 2028 lens, the reason may become more apparent. Khanna is not wrong that the Biden-driven calendar rules changes may hurt the president in New Hampshire in the general election, but the question is whether the damage has already been done or if it will take the president not being on the ballot (in a largely uncompetitive race) to fully push enough New Hampshire supporters away. FHQ is dubious. Clearly, Khanna is betting that New Hampshire will be there (early) in 2028, and that is no sure thing. 

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On this date...

...in 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis both handily won the Nebraska and West Virginia primaries.

...in 2016, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia primary. Trump also won in Nebraska. [Democrats in the Cornhusker state had caucused earlier in the year. Delegates were allocated based on that contest despite there being a beauty contest primary in Nebraska.]

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