The morning after the Iowa caucuses, former Ambassador Nikki Haley’s campaign made an unexpected announcement. The next primary debate for the remaining Republican presidential candidates was scheduled for Thursday — as in, tomorrow — but the South Carolinian said she won’t participate in any additional primary debates unless Donald Trump also agrees to appear on the stage.
ABC News and WMUR-TV in New Hampshire gave Haley and the former president a 5 p.m. deadline to “commit” to the event. When the GOP contenders missed that deadline, the networks scrapped their scheduled plans. The New York Times reported overnight:
ABC News canceled a Republican presidential debate scheduled for Thursday in New Hampshire, after Ron DeSantis was the only candidate who had agreed to participate. … Ms. Haley’s statement also cast uncertainty over another upcoming Republican debate in New Hampshire, hosted by CNN and scheduled for Sunday.
[Update: Shortly after I published this, CNN canceled Sunday’s debate.]
For those keeping score, there have been five debates thus far for GOP presidential hopefuls in this election cycle, starting with a Fox News debate held in August, which generated a television audience of roughly 13 million viewers. But in the four events that followed, viewership dropped considerably — by one count, only 2.6 million viewers tuned in for last week’s Haley/DeSantis debate on CNN — and there was little to suggest those numbers would change.
What’s more, with Trump refusing to participate in any primary debate — and by all appearances, paying no meaningful political price for his obstinance — the case for a sixth and seventh debate was becoming increasingly difficult to make.
And so, barring an unexpected change of heart from two of three remaining candidates, the primary debate phase of the Republicans’ nominating process has come to a rather sudden halt. I’m left, however, with a related question that’s more difficult to answer: When exactly will American voters see the next presidential debate?
The obvious answer might seem to be “sometime in the fall, ahead of the 2024 general election,” but let’s not forget that it was nearly two years ago when the Republican National Committee announced a rather dramatic shift in how the party would approach debates going forward. According to the RNC’s plan, the party’s presidential candidates would only agree to participate in RNC-approved debates — and the party said it would no longer sanction events hosted and organized by the independent Commission on Presidential Debates.
It’s the same non-partisan commission that’s been responsible for general election debates in recent decades.
The party’s rationale was difficult to take seriously — the RNC and Trump have accused the commission of “bias,” reality notwithstanding — but the move created the very real possibility that there would be no debates ahead of Election Day 2024.
To be sure, the RNC’s move didn’t come out of nowhere. As we’ve discussed, in October 2020, the Trump campaign claimed the commission was secretly supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy (which wasn’t true). A week later, when the CPD announced that the second Trump-Biden debate would be virtual due to the pandemic, Republicans responded with outrage (which wasn’t justified).
There are still a variety of possible resolutions. Maybe the Commission on Presidential Debates will approve a series of RNC-demanded “reforms,” which would lead the party to back off. Maybe Trump will ignore the RNC’s position and agree to participate anyway. Time will tell.
But for now, it’s an open question whether Americans will see any additional presidential debates — primary or general election — before 2027.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
