The RNC

Carly Fiorina camp goes to war with the RNC


The Republican businesswoman is crying foul over possibly being left off the next main debate stage. The RNC’s response — tough luck.

By Steven Shepard

The first GOP presidential candidate to go to war publicly with the Republican National Committee is not Donald Trump. It’s Carly Fiorina.

Faced with the very real possibility that she will again be relegated to a lower-tier debate, Fiorina’s campaign is going after the RNC and the news organization the committee picked to host the next debate, CNN.

What has ensued is a tense back-and-forth, with Fiorina’s camp charging that the RNC should be doing more to ensure that the debate stage represents the true top 10 candidates, and the RNC saying tough luck, the rules are set.

Fiorina, the only female candidate in the GOP field, has surged in the polls since a widely praised performance in the “happy hour” debate earlier this month. But she has a problem: There haven’t been enough polls to catapult Fiorina from 14th place, where she stood going into that debate, into the top 10 ranking for CNN’s Sept. 16 debate.

That’s because CNN — unlike Fox News, which used only the final five polls released before its debate — outlined criteria this spring in which it said it would average the results of polls released between July 16 and Sept. 10. And of the 10 polls that currently qualify for inclusion in CNN’s average, eight were conducted before the first debate.

The Fiorina campaign’s solution? Since CNN has already said it will use all the polls, it should weight down the older surveys and weight up the post-debate polls — and the RNC should make sure that happens.

“The RNC should ask CNN to treat the polling in July the same as the polling that comes after,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, in a Medium post. “Because there were nine polls released in the three weeks before the last debate, one would expect 18 polls released in the six weeks between the two debates. If that does not happen, the polling average of those six weeks should be treated as the equivalent of 18 polls. Assuming the numbers remain consistent with current polling, Carly would easily place in the top 10 for the main debate.”

But the RNC says Fiorina’s campaign is trying to change previously disclosed rules it doesn’t like. And the committee’s only role in the process is to make sure the rules are applied fairly and without exception.

The Fiorina campaign’s offensive began Wednesday, one day after a short telephone conversation between two representatives of the campaign, Isgur Flores and campaign manager Frank Sadler, and Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist and communications director, who is acting as a liaison to the campaigns during the primary process.

The call lasted less than two minutes, and the Fiorina campaign gave no indication it would be going public.

The RNC’s response is the same answer it gave after calls to ban Trump from the stage at the first debate: According to federal law, the committee can’t put its thumb on the scale to help one candidate or harm another. All it can do is hand off the process to partners who pledge to apply the rules fairly.

“All the candidates are well aware that, by law, the media set the criteria,” Spicer told POLITICO. “Candidates — including the Fiorina campaign — had asked that the criteria be well-known before the process. CNN had made the criteria known four months ago.”

The Fiorina campaign said it went public — posting on Medium after also leaking the document to POLITICO and National Review — after confirming with the RNC and CNN that the rules remain the same.

“We had confirmation from CNN and the RNC that they were satisfied with the way things were,” Isgur Flores said. “Which we found to be pretty egregious — considering there have been two polls in three weeks [following the debate].” Isgur Flores previously was an RNC staffer before joining Fiorina’s election effort in January.

The public spat between the RNC and Fiorina’s camp comes as the second-tier candidates are still stewing over their treatment in the Aug. 6 debate, which featured an empty arena and seemed to reinforce the narrative that it was the “loser debate.”

Still, Fiorina delivered a standout performance that gave her campaign a needed boost. But it’s looking like it may not be enough.

While a handful of new polls are likely to be released leading up to CNN’s Sept. 10 deadline for inclusion, it’s all but certain that number will fall short of the 18 the Fiorina campaign is suggesting should be expected.

It’s also unrealistic to expect the same flood of new polls that preceded the Fox News debate right before the Sept. 10 deadline. That would require pollsters to interview voters over Labor Day weekend — a time when polls could be biased because fewer voters are home.

Still, there are a number of pollsters who conducted surveys in July and August who have yet to weigh in since the first debate. They include ABC News/Washington Post, Quinnipiac University, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Monmouth University and Bloomberg News.

Quinnipiac University will release the results of its new poll on the presidential race on Thursday, and Monmouth University will follow with a new survey next week. The Fiorina campaign expects at least one more national poll before the deadline, but some pollsters are expected to sit this one out. For example, it’s unlikely NBC News/Wall Street Journal will conduct another poll before the deadline, leaving its late-July survey — in which Fiorina earned 0 percent of the vote — as its sole contribution to the CNN average.

A POLITICO analysis of the polls currently comprising CNN’s average lays bare Fiorina’s challenge. She’s currently in 12th place, at an average of 1.7 percent. That’s despite earning 5 percent in both post-debate polls, conducted by CNN/ORC and Fox News.

The 10th-place candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, is at 3.3 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, in ninth, is ahead of Christie by just a tenth of a point.

Even if every pollster that has conducted a poll since mid-July released a new survey before the CNN deadline, it might not help Fiorina qualify for the main stage if all the surveys counted equally. If Christie and Fiorina repeated their performance in the two post-debate polls (5 percent for Fiorina, 3 percent for Christie) in each of those hypothetical surveys, she would only tie Christie in the overall average. (The tiebreaker is performance in polls in the four early caucus or primary states, which would favor Fiorina.)

But after determining that the final polling average could very well include more surveys conducted before the first debate than after, Isgur Flores aimed directly at the pollsters and the RNC in her Medium post.

“To be clear, if Carly isn’t on the main stage, it will not be because her rise in the polls can’t overcome lower polling from July, but because only two of CNN’s chosen polling companies have released polls at all since the first debate,” she wrote. “If the RNC won’t tell CNN to treat post-debate polling consistently with pre-debate polling, they are putting their thumb on the scale and choosing to favor candidates with higher polling for three weeks in July over candidates with measurable momentum in August and September.”

CNN, like the RNC, claimed it can’t change rules it has already set.

“CNN published the criteria for the CNN-Reagan Library debate on May 20th. It will encompass polling data from three weeks prior to the first debate and five weeks following,” said CNN spokeswoman Barbara Levin. “Federal Election Commission guidelines make it clear that these criteria cannot be changed after they have been published. We believe that our approach is a fair and effective way to deal with the highest number of candidates we have ever encountered.”

Asked in a follow-up interview to respond to the RNC’s assertion that it was powerless to convince CNN to change the rules, Isgur Flores called it “a convenient interpretation of the law that suits their ends” and pointed to a last-minute change from Fox News before its first debate that allowed candidates polling under 1 percent to participate in the “happy hour” debate. That rule had threatened to exclude Fiorina and a handful of other low-polling candidates.

And asked whether the RNC and CNN were enforcing the rules to exclude Fiorina from the debate specifically, Isgur Flores said, “The result kind of speaks for itself.”

The RNC’s Spicer countered, arguing that the Fiorina campaign hadn’t complained about the rules until it was clear that they would affect their candidate negatively.

While most of the sniping between the Fiorina campaign and the RNC has been among staffers, the candidate herself jabbed at the national party committee in an interview Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“I didn’t think the Fox News rules were good using national polls; I don’t think the CNN rules are particularly good, especially since they go all the way back through mid-July,” she said. “But you know what? I don’t have any impact over the rules. I think it’s why people are losing trust in the media, frankly, and are upset in many cases with the RNC.”