GOP Candidates Draft Letter To Networks

After the Republicans were trounced by the Democrats in the 2012 election cycle, the national party vowed to make sweeping, forward-looking changes to ensure it could never happen again. One of those changes was getting control of an unwieldy primary debate process in which the 2012 candidates feasted on one another while President Obama was able to consolidate his base.

And for a while, it seemed the national party had indeed gotten control of that process — until last week’s debate in Boulder, Colo., hosted by CNBC. The event was roundly panned by the conservative news media, the Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and the candidates, who almost all felt that the CNBC moderators asked “gotcha” questions aimed at minimizing them.

So it was that several of the campaigns attended an emergency meeting on Sunday evening, the result of which was a letter that the Republican elections lawyer Ben Ginsberg, serving in a volunteer capacity to represent the campaigns, will send to the news media outlets hosting future debates. The details of the early draft of the letter include requirements that debate moderators not ask yes-or-no questions without time to respond, not ask candidates to ask questions of one another, and not ask candidates questions that require a raising of the hand.

That last point appears to have been put in place thanks to Donald J. Trump, who was the only person who raised his hand when asked out of the gate in the first debate, hosted by Fox News, about refusing to rule out a third-party run.

The biggest takeaways from the meeting were that the candidates are planning to circumvent the Republican National Committee by sending the letter directly to networks, and that the candidates themselves are deeply frustrated. And some major donors, who had been among Mr. Priebus’s biggest supporters over the last four years, are privately fuming that he has lost control of the debates.

In an unusual election cycle prodded along by anger among Republican base voters, the debates have been essential in determining the contours of the race — elevating Mr. Trump and Ben Carson early on, for instance, and contributing to the sinking of Jeb Bush. So the candidates want maximum say over the events from which most voters are getting their information.

The debates in many ways are a stand-in for a party that is deeply divided, and a visceral frustration from the campaign operatives, and some candidates, about their lack of control of the race at large, at a moment when Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson, combined, have almost 50 percent of the primary vote. Those two candidates seem content to follow their own rules if they do not like the existing ones. For instance, at one point during the meeting, Mr. Bush’s campaign manager, Danny Diaz, suggested reinstating a debate hosted by the Spanish-language station Telemundo. But Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said his candidate would never show up for that debate. Source NY Times