By the time Floridians voted in their Republican presidential
primary, two of the candidates had already participated in 19
nationally televised debates. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick
Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul had been among five GOP hopefuls
who appeared in the first TV debate of the long campaign on May 5,
2011, in Greenville, South Carolina. The other three candidates who
had been on the stage at that event televised by Fox News—former
New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty,
and Atlanta businessman Herman Cain—were all out of the race by the
time of the January 31 primary in Florida. And their fates offered
an insight into the way TV debates shaped this year’s campaign:
- Johnson’s libertarian message failed to attract the kind of
support that had made a political cult figure of Paul, who espouses
similar positions. Despite his successful record as governor,
Johnson never registered the kind of poll numbers necessary to
qualify for inclusion in most of the later debates. He finally quit
the GOP race in December and announced he would seek the
Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination.
- Before the campaign began, Pawlenty had been expected to be
among the most formidable challengers to the preemptive Republican
frontrunner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Pawlenty had a
strong record and was praised by many leading conservative pundits,
including George F. Will. Yet Pawlenty proved to be lackluster in
debates, beginning with that May debate in South Carolina, where he
was upstaged by the charismatic Cain. In the second debate—June 13
in Manchester, New Hampshire—Pawlenty was again upstaged, this time
by Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, whose entry into the 2012 field
made her an instant celebrity among the Republican contenders.
Pawlenty then focused his efforts on a showdown with Bachmann in
the Iowa GOP straw poll in August. A debate on Fox News two days
before that crucial event was highlighted by the clash between
Pawlenty and Bachmann, a conflict that most observers saw as
favoring the latter. Bachmann won the straw poll and Pawlenty, who
finished a weak third behind Paul, quit the race the next day.
- Cain’s strong performance in the first South Carolina debate
immediately generated buzz for his Tea Party-backed candidacy. In a
post-debate focus group run by pollster Frank Luntz, Cain was the
near-unanimous winner. But he got relatively little attention in
the next few debates. The June debate in New Hampshire was
highlighted not only by Bachmann’s campaign debut, but also by
Romney’s first appearance in a TV debate. The August debate in Iowa
focused mainly on the Pawlenty-Bachmann battle. And in three
September debates, the most closely watched candidate was Texas
Gov. Rick Perry. But when Perry turned in a series of disastrous
performances—especially the September 22 Fox News debate in
Orlando—the Texan’s poll numbers collapsed and, by virtue of
winning the Florida GOP straw poll, Cain suddenly became the new
frontrunner. Cain’s own debate performances raised questions about
his preparedness for the presidency, especially in terms of foreign
policy, but he was ultimately undone by a series of allegations of
sexual impropriety.
Such were the fates of three-fifths of the candidates who
appeared in the first televised debate of the long 2012 campaign,
and neither of the two survivors from that first debate—Santorum
and Paul—were viewed as serious contenders for the Florida primary
by the time the 19th debate, this one televised by CNN, was held in
Jacksonville on January 26. The frontrunners were Romney, who had
been campaigning for president more or less nonstop since 2007, and
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose strong debate
performances were generally credited for his victory in the January
21 South Carolina primary.
Judged strictly from the size of the crowd on the debate stages,
the 2012 GOP campaign peaked on September 22, when nine
candidates—Romney, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Johnson, Paul, Cain,
Santorum, and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman—participated in the Fox
News debate in Orlando. That night was destined to be remembered
for what ultimately proved to be the fatal blow to Perry’s
once-formidable campaign.
Challenged over a policy that permitted illegal immigrants to
pay reduced in-state tuition at Texas universities, Perry said of
the policy’s critics: “I don’t think you have a heart.” Perry’s
support collapsed almost overnight. Prior to that debate, the Real
Clear Politics average of national polls had shown the Texan
leading the field, with an eight-point margin over Romney. Within
two weeks, however, Perry had slipped to third in the Gallup poll.
By the third week of October, Perry had a mere 6 percent in a
CBS/New York Times poll that showed him fifth. Perry’s campaign,
which had raised millions of dollars in the weeks after he entered
the race, began spending heavily on TV advertising in Iowa in an
effort to recover his lost momentum. Yet this proved futile, as
Perry’s debate gaffes continued to haunt him. In a November 9
debate in Michigan, televised by CNBC, Perry couldn’t remember the
names of the three federal departments he had proposed abolishing.
He eventually placed a disappointing fifth in the Iowa caucuses,
ultimately quitting the race and endorsing Gingrich two days before
the South Carolina primary.
Three days before Perry quit, Huntsman dropped out and endorsed
Romney. The Huntsman campaign had, at times, seemed to exist
entirely for the purpose of allowing him to participate in the TV
debates. His poll numbers among Republican voters never reached
double digits, yet he always seemed to poll just well enough to
clear the thresholds set by the TV networks that controlled the
debate rosters. And so Huntsman—whom I dubbed “Governor
Asterisk”—often chewed up a substantial slice of TV time during the
12 debates in which he appeared, even though he was the least
plausible of the Republican candidates. Huntsman had a reasonably
conservative record in Utah, but had accepted a position as
ambassador to China from President Obama, whom he had effusively
praised. The Huntsman candidacy was propped up by laudatory
coverage from liberal outlets like MSNBC. When he scored a
third-place finish January 10 in New Hampshire, exit polls showed
most of Huntsman’s support came from voters who approved of Obama’s
policies and opposed the Tea Party movement. In his speech on
primary night in Manchester, however, Huntsman called his 17
percent showing a “ticket to ride” in South Carolina and beyond.
But that ticket was soon shown to be invalid, and he quit before
the next debate, January 16 in Myrtle Beach.
By the time Huntsman and Perry withdrew, Bachmann had already
departed the campaign trail, quitting the day after the Iowa
caucuses, where she placed sixth. With a strong conservative record
and support from the Tea Party movement, Bachmann was also
unmistakably telegenic and might have been expected to flourish in
a campaign so clearly defined by TV debates. Yet she never was able
to capitalize on her August victory in the Iowa straw poll, and the
debates might have had a lot to do with the way Bachmann’s campaign
fizzled. She landed forceful attacks on Perry, Romney, and Gingrich
during the debates, but felt that she wasn’t getting as much
attention as other candidates. And there was good reason for
Bachmann to suspect she was being slighted by the debate
moderators. Before a November debate in Spartanburg, South
Carolina, hosted by CBS, an e-mail from one of the network’s
reporters was accidentally sent to one of Bachmann’s staffers,
saying that “she’s not going to get many questions and she’s nearly
off the charts.”
This evidence that the networks were playing favorites,
particularly to the disadvantage of candidates who ranked lower in
the polls, seemed to confirm a factor that other
candidates—including Cain and Santorum—had previously complained
about. The debates sometimes seemed staged to provide
headline-making conflicts between frontrunners, and this
show-business aspect tended to disadvantage the “second-tier”
candidates. There was other evidence to that effect, such as when
media reporter Howard Kurtz watched while the Fox News team planned
for the September debate in Orlando, with Fox News managing editor
Bill Sammon commenting that the planned questions would “get some
fireworks going.”
Had the dominance of televised debates reduced the 2012 campaign
to the level of a show-biz publicity stunt, manipulated by TV
networks? Had the relationship between poll numbers and media
coverage become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, so that only
those with good poll numbers could expect good coverage, and
vice-versa? Had network executives and pollsters completely
replaced Republican voters as the deciders of the GOP nomination?
These were obvious questions raised by the long campaign, but none
of the moderators in any of the debates ever raised those
questions, perhaps for the same reason the Wizard of Oz warned
Dorothy to ignore that man behind the curtain.
