SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — A broad consensus is beginning to take hold among Republican party officials that the presidential primary debates shouldn’t include any more than a dozen candidates — despite the fact that there might be as many as 19 declared candidates by the time the primary debates start this August.

Though the precise criteria for debate participation ultimately will be decided by the networks staging them — and party leaders continue to insist nothing has been finalized — there is behind-the-scenes agreement here at the Republican National Committee spring meeting that the first debates should be capped at 12 candidates.


“Our goal is to accommodate as many candidates as possible at the beginning,” said Steve Duprey, the New Hampshire committeeman who chairs the RNC’s 2016 debate committee. “I think there’s consensus to cap it between nine and 12. And we may not need more than that, depending on how the contest goes. Each of the media partners may have different criteria and they’re going to evolve.”

The RNC’s preferences are merely guidelines for the media organizations sponsoring the debates. Nevertheless, the party hopes to influence the discussion by suggesting limits on the number of candidates — although in a sign of the sensitivities surrounding the idea of a hard cap, RNC spokesman Sean Spicer won’t refer to it as such.

“There’s no cap,” Spicer said during a media briefing Friday morning. “What there is are some logistical realities — you can only fit so many people on a stage. That number is being looked at constantly.”

In previous election cycles, early debate criteria stipulated that a candidate was eligible for inclusion once they attained at least 1 percent in the national polls. But Spicer said that threshold wouldn’t work this time around.

“We want to run the most inclusive debate possible,” Spicer said. “If you take the standard used previously, having at least one percent in national polls, you wind up with 17 candidates on the stage. That’s not going to work.”

“If a network came to us and said we’re only having seven candidates for the first debate, we’d say that’s probably not enough,” Spicer said. “But the networks have to come up with criteria for participation that’s fair; we’re just consulting with them.”

Despite the deference to the media partners, some network sources expressed frustration that the debate committee was publicly floating proposed caps on the number of candidates involved. The criteria for the debates is up to the networks, they said.

While the size of the potential 2016 field presents unprecedented challenges for debate organizers, air time will be at even more of a premium due to the RNC’s move earlier this year to sanction just nine debates, with the possibility of adding three more down the line. That’s almost half the amount of air time that was up for grabs four years ago when there were 20 GOP primary debates.

The first debate, slated for Aug. 6 in Cleveland, will be sponsored by Fox News. CNN is set to host the second debate in September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library outside of Los Angeles; and CNBC is hosting the third debate in October in Colorado, one of a handful of general election swing states the RNC has chosen to host debates. That’s a break from past precedent that saw most of the debates hosted by Iowa, New Hampshire and other states with an outsized role in settling the nomination battle.

Spokespeople for those networks did not respond to POLITICO by press time.

“I can’t see the networks wanting any more than 12 candidates,” said Glenn McCall, the RNC committeeman from South Carolina. “For them, it’s about ratings; and people aren’t going to watch if there are 16 candidates and they each get to talk for a couple of minutes.”

Balancing network logistics with the party’s desire to showcase a strong, diverse field of candidates is driving the complicated negotiations.

“This is like splitting an atom,” Spicer said. “If it were easy, it’d be figured out already.”

At the news conference Friday, Spicer addressed concerns held by some RNC members about the chance that specific candidates — the only woman in the field, Carly Fiorina, or the only African-American, Ben Carson — would be left off the stage. Gender or race, he said, would likely not be part of the criteria, whatever the optics turn out to be.

“We’re going to set criteria that is fair and open and that people can meet; but, I think, just because of your gender, you’re not going to get on the debate stage,” he said.

“In the preliminary conversations we had with CNBC about the debate to be held in Colorado in October, the concerns centered around how they could get more than six candidates on the stage and how they would manage the time and debate format in a meaningful way,” said Ryan Call, the former Colorado GOP chairman who was involved in early conversations with CNBC after the debate locations were announced.

By beginning the debate season in August as opposed to April, as it happened in the 2012 election cycle — and by limiting the number of debates and spacing them roughly a month apart — the RNC has sought to streamline the process to the point where the current hypothetical of having 19 prospective candidates on stage may be a problem that works itself out as the nominating contest goes on.

“The field may whittle itself down; some people may not even declare,” Duprey said. “Clearly, you’re not going to get into the debate if you’re not a declared candidate.”

South Carolina GOP Chairman Matt Moore likened the process to a season of ‘Survivor.’

“It’s like every month, a few more candidates get voted off the island,” Moore said. “By the time they get to South Carolina [which hosts a debate with CBS in February], there shouldn’t be more than three or four of them onstage.”

Rick Santorum, who was the last 2012 challenger to fold on Mitt Romney’s run to the GOP nomination, may be one of those candidates on the bubble come August, if there are a dozen or fewer podiums on the debate stage.

After addressing the RNC meeting Thursday afternoon, Santorum joked that the candidates should just draw straws to be split into two separate groups that take turns on the debate stage.

But months from now, when the first candidates are turned away, no one expects them to be joking.

“Those candidates are not going to be happy,” said one RNC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “That’s one of the reasons to defer and let the networks make the final call on how many candidates they’ll accommodate and what the criteria will be.”

Another unspoken reason for deferring to the media partners is a legal one; the RNC leaves itself open to lawsuits if it’s deciding which candidates get onto the debate stage because the network media exposure – worth millions of dollars – can be read as a campaign contribution.