The first 2016 GOP debate is coming up — and its biggest losers will be decided ahead of time

The first Republican presidential debate takes place in less than a month, and the party is confronting a knotty problem: How do you hold a greatly anticipated debate when you have 16 candidates in the race? There may be no solution, and the result is that some candidates will be excluded unfairly. Their campaigns will suffer a serious blow because of it. And it all turns on what will be essentially arbitrary distinctions between the candidates in the middle of the pack.

Before we get to why, we should understand that this is actually a critical issue for the 2016 race. Primary debates are important not because they change huge numbers of minds, but because of the life they take on afterward, mostly in the way they influence reporters. The moments that reporters decide are important or revealing or amusing get played and replayed on television and mentioned in newspaper stories. The candidates who are judged to have performed well get more attention, while those who are judged to have done poorly are ridiculed. And the ones who didn't even get to participate? They could wind up being ignored, until they receive what's sometimes referred to as "death watch coverage," attention that consists of little more than asking when this person is going to get out of the race.

So debates can have a profound impact even if the audience tuning in is small. And this year, the debates — particularly the early ones — could have more of an impact than ever. With all those candidates, the press (like the Republican Party itself) will be looking for ways to bring some order to this chaotic situation. And if you had a debate with 16 candidates on stage, it would be absurd.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Let's assume it lasts two hours, and a good quarter of that time is given over to the moderators making introductions, asking questions, and directing traffic. That would leave 90 minutes for candidates talking, which amounts to just over five and a half minutes per candidate. That's not nearly enough to time to deal with any issue in depth, explore the differences between you and your opponents, or offer the audience much of anything that will help them make a choice.

But the solution the party and the networks have come up with — allow only the top 10 candidates to participate, based on recent polls — is deeply unfair. To see why, let's take a look at the latest Huffpost Pollster poll average. The person in 10th place is Chris Christie, with an average support of 3 percent of primary voters. So he'd get to participate, but Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, and George Pataki wouldn't, even though there's no real statistical difference between any of them. As one political scientist recently told Bloomberg News, "A microscope has not yet been invented that enables us to determine the difference between the 10th-place person and the 11th-place person."

So those whose candidacies are perfectly legitimate will be shut out. Much as some of us (including me) like to make fun of this group, on paper anyway there are many more than 10 who can claim to be serious candidates. For instance, I may think that a Ted Cruz presidency would be cataclysmic, but he's a United States senator, so you can't argue that he doesn't deserve to participate in the process. In this field of 16 (which counts the announced candidates, plus Scott Walker and John Kasich, both of whom will be officially entering soon), you have four senators, one former senator, four governors, and four former governors. Even if you removed the three amateur politicians waging vanity campaigns (Trump, Carson, and Fiorina), you'd still have 13 genuine candidates.

But if you are going to limit the debates, what's a better way to choose who gets in? There may not be one that's any more objective. Some have suggested a kind of round-robin tournament, where there would be a series of debates featuring four or five candidates chosen at random, eventually allowing everyone to participate in a few. That would certainly be more equitable, but it wouldn't create the same kind of dramatic media event that the television networks crave.

That leaves us with a format everyone acknowledges is unfair, and which could destroy a candidacy or two just by omission. Even these guys deserve better than that — but nobody can figure out what else to do.