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
8/26/15 8:38 AM EDT Updated 8/26/15 10:41 PM EDT
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.”
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