According to plans announced late Wednesday, Fox now will host a 90-minute televised forum in Cleveland on the afternoon of August 6 for Republican candidates who fail to qualify for that evening’s 90-minute debate.
The announcement capped a chaotic three-hour stretch that began when the New Hampshire Union-Leader published a story announcing it would host a forum on August 6. Publisher Joe McQuaid was quoted in the story saying that the qualification criteria established by Fox for the first debate—that candidates must rank in the top 10 in an average of recent national polls—”isn’t just bad for New Hampshire; it’s bad for the presidential selection process by limiting the field to only the best-known few with the biggest bankrolls.”
But the newspaper, in throwing a lifeline to candidates who fail to qualify for the Fox debate, also seemed to be daring them to violate party rules and risk being excluded from all future forums. That’s because the Republican National Committee, aiming to bring order to what was an unwieldy process in 2012, established a rule for 2016 that says that any candidate who participates in a nonsanctioned debate will be ineligible to participate in any of the party’s sanctioned ones.
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