As the 2016 presidential campaign picks up speed, GOP candidates are beginning to fold. On Sept. 13, Rick Perry was the first to officially announce the end of his presidential campaign, followed on Monday by Scott Walker. This was not particularly surprising—their campaigns had been dealing with financial issues for months—but it was odd given their political experience and strong runs in recent years. Fellow candidate Rand Paul said of Perry that “it shows what an extraordinary thing it is to run for the presidency that someone who is a very popular multi-term governor from a big state still didn’t resonate enough to really get a campaign going.”
Perry is not the only one who is failing to resonate. Several candidates with multi-term experience (Jindal, Graham, and Santorum) have all been stuck in the lower tier of the debates. In contrast, many of the top candidates have either minor political experience (such as junior senators Cruz and Rubio) or no political experience at all (Carson, Fiorina, and Trump). This lack of experience doesn’t seem to be working against them: in the latest CNN poll, Trump, Fiorina, and Carson are holding first, second, and third place respectively.
This trend is due in part to Americans’ frustrations and their disinterest in listening to actual policy. But more worrying is the role that the media play in framing how Americans view the election process and how they evaluate the candidates. The debates are one of the few opportunities candidates have to publicly discuss policy with each other. Unfortunately, news networks control these debates, and rather than use them to encourage political discourse, continually minimize the opportunities candidates have to engage in real discussion. Notably, at this point in the 2012 election cycle, six Republican debates had already taken place, which offered more opportunities for candidates to rise, fall, and narrow down the field. As a result, only nine candidates remained. In contrast, the two debates have only removed two candidates, leaving 15 candidates still vying for the nomination.
Moreover, the two debates that have occurred thus far have had little, if any, real discourse over political issues, not because the candidates are unable to have these conversations but because the structure of the debates doesn’t allow them. When asked a question, each candidate has only one minute to respond before they are cut off by a bell. The majority of these questions either promote infighting among the candidates, which occurred for the first half-hour of the second debate, or highlight controversy, explaining Trump’s whopping 10 (and a half!) minutes of speaking time in the first debate.
As Neil Postman wrote, “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.” How the media have staged the debates and the election cycle informs how the American voters judge who is successful: by how well they conform to these constraints. Winners of the debates are judged neither on the soundness of their answers nor on the clarity of their ideas, but rather on their ability to make sharp, savvy remarks and to defend themselves against other candidates. This affects not only the American voters but also the candidates themselves, who often struggle to string together a coherent thought for 60 seconds, instead resorting to emotional appeals to win voters over.
What is most worrying is that this debate structure won’t produce a candidate capable of solving America’s real political issues. In the three-hour CNN debate, moderator Jake Tapper mentioned “a lot of questions on social media about the economy and jobs”. Despite this interest, however, there was little conversation about debt other than that used to critique Trump’s business practices. Additionally, while the economy was mentioned by candidates in relation to other topics, the moderators themselves didn’t pose a single question to the candidates about their economic policy. If candidates are able to succeed without having to tackle issues that voters really care about, the eventual nominee will be ill-equipped to put forth policies that solve voters’ problems.
The media’s framing of the election cycle through the debates has undoubtedly influenced what Americans are looking for and who they support, as seen in Trump’s nearly three-month lead in the polls and Fiorina’s rise from less than 1 percent of the vote to second place after a few sharp debate responses. With these methods of representing political candidates to voters, those vying for the presidency can coast on their personas all the way to the White House, and the issues on which Americans so desperately want answers will never be resolved.