Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo` Analysis How the Dems Should Blow Up Their Debates For starters, putting Marianne Williamson on stage is hurting the party’s chances to unseat Trump. Here’s how to scrap the rules and start over.

Matt Bennett is an executive vice president at Third Way, a center-left think tank. David de la Fuente is a senior policy adviser at Third Way, a center-left think tank.

“Girlfriend, you are so on.” Thus spoke Marianne Williamson, author and spiritual adviser to the stars, responding to a question at a Democratic presidential debate in which she was, inexplicably, taking part. Standing alongside a former vice president and four U.S. senators, Williamson said her first act as president of the United States would be, naturally, to call New Zealand’s prime minister.

You would think that Williamson’s performance would mean that she would be so off the stage for the second round of 2020 debates, scheduled to be aired next week on CNN. But no, POLITICO and others project that she’ll be one of the 20 candidates selected during Thursday night’s live debate-draw telecast. It’s not too late to change the rules—immediately.


Beating Donald Trump is the political cause of our lifetimes. Democrats simply cannot afford a process for picking our nominee that advantages the activist left over the mainstream, the wealthy over the middle class, and the television famous over viable leaders. Before the July debates, the Democratic National Committee should scrap its rules for selecting debate participants and start over.

The inclusion of Williamson and other fringe candidates at the MSNBC debates—and the exclusion of quality, substantive contenders like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock—was the absurd if unintended consequence of the plan for limiting debate participants developed by Tom Perez, chair of the DNC. Perez is a brilliant and dedicated party leader. But he made a mistake with this debate plan, and it could affect our party’s ability to beat Donald Trump in 2020.

Perez decided, sensibly enough, that 25 candidates were too many, and 20 across two nights was a reasonable number. And the DNC rightly made the two nights balanced, rather than offer “varsity” and “JV” rounds, as the Republicans foolishly did in 2016. But the metrics the DNC uses to measure debate worthiness do not withstand scrutiny.

The first is the candidates’ performance in three public polls. Intuitively, that makes a degree of sense, because polling seems to measure viability. But the threshold to participate in the July debates is just 1 percent, and the margin of error in most of these polls usually is around 3 percent. That means that a candidate with 0 percent and another with 1 percent could very well have demonstrated the same amount of support. There is almost no meaningful statistical significance to the difference between 0 percent and 1 percent, or 0 percent and 2 percent, the required number for the third debate in September.

The second DNC metric is the candidates’ number of reported donors. This requirement is even more absurd. For the July debate, candidates need 65,000 donors to qualify if they missed the mark with polling. This metric weighs those who give online (even just $1) over those who give small amounts in cash in a way that’s not trackable, like tossing a bill into a collection bucket in a church basement or labor hall. And online donors are higher income and more likely to be white than average voters.

The first debates should have served as the Democrats’ introduction of our robust field of credible contenders to the American electorate. Instead voters were distracted by gadflies and marginal candidates.

So how should the DNC have chosen? By bringing subjective judgment to bear. The error was in trying to use objective metrics where none exist.

One guide are the criteria used to determine seniority in the Senate. There, how you rank is based on years of Senate service, but ties are broken by your résumé: previous service as a senator, vice president, House member, Cabinet secretary and governor. To decide what candidates make the cut for the next debate, the DNC should also weigh whether the candidate is a current or former officeholder.

The DNC could allot wild-card slots for other candidates who are worthy based on public sentiment as measured through polling and financial support. And it could allow campaigns to collect verified petition signatures as a way of showing individual support that doesn’t favor the donor class. (This would have the added benefit of collecting the names of a bunch of excited Democrats for future campaigns.)

Based on one application of these criteria, 13 candidates would qualify automatically for the July debates: former Vice President Biden, Senators Bennet, Booker, Gillibrand, Harris, Klobuchar, Sanders and Warren, Governors Bullock and Inslee, and House Members Gabbard, Moulton and Ryan.

That leaves some wild-card positions that could reasonably be awarded to those with lighter resumes. These likely would be given to Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, and businessman Andrew Yang. Those on the bubble for consideration would include former Governor John Hickenlooper and former Congressmen John Delaney and Joe Sestak. Candidates like Williamson and Tom Steyer, a businessman who joined the race just this month and has no previous elected experience, would be excluded.

There is one more variable that the DNC should consider as an automatic disqualification: having tried to beat Democrats in important and recent races. In 2014, Williamson ran for Congress. In California’s open primary, she ran as an independent, hoping to knock off two credible Democrats and take on the Republican in a runoff. Thankfully, she failed (coming in fourth), and Rep. Ted Lieu now holds that seat. And Mike Gravel, a former Democratic senator from Alaska, ran for president as a Libertarian in 2008. Gravel has admitted he isn’t running a campaign to win but rather just to make the debate stage to advocate his pet issues.

The Gravel case shows how ridiculous the DNC’s rules are: a fake candidate almost beat out a real candidate like Bullock for a spot on the July debate stage. This cannot be allowed to happen. Someone at the DNC has to exercise some judgment.