Multi-Party Debates

If we get into a time where one party chooses their crowned leader, and then the other party chooses 20 different people to run against them, as happened in the last two national elections. Should we allow all candidates to debate each other? No just the winner of the primaries? I have no doubt that Clinton could have held her own against debating all 15 GOP members running in 2016. I would pay for Trump to debate just two democrats at the same time.

NeverTrump said:

If we get into a time where one party chooses their crowned leader, and then the other party chooses 20 different people to run against them, as happened in the last two national elections. Should we allow all candidates to debate each other? No just the winner of the primaries? I have no doubt that Clinton could have held her own against debating all 15 GOP members running in 2016. I would pay for Trump to debate just two democrats at the same time.

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I think this should go above just two parties. I think we should allow 5 candidates period. Dem and rep (just because they are usually the biggest two) and then the next three largest garnering percentage independent candidates, whatever their percentage)

NeverTrump said:

If we get into a time where one party chooses their crowned leader, and then the other party chooses 20 different people to run against them, as happened in the last two national elections. Should we allow all candidates to debate each other? No just the winner of the primaries? I have no doubt that Clinton could have held her own against debating all 15 GOP members running in 2016. I would pay for Trump to debate just two Democrats at the same time.

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As far as having the runner up in a primary debate the challenger from the opposing party I don't think that makes a ton of sense. The only purpose it would serve would be to make Trump waste his time helping the Democrats figure out who is most likely to beat him. Why would he do that? It's the Democrats job to try and figure that out, and send that person into the General.

Now, what I would say is that when you have potentially 15-20 candidates running in a primary it's nonsensically stupid to have them all appear on the same debate stage at the same time. I think they should do a round robin style format where each candidate gets to debate at most two other candidates at a time. I think during the republicans debate last go around they did something like this, but they separated it into two tiers of candidates. There were still 7 people on each stage which was kind of stupid.

I also think the primary should be done using ranked choice voting for this reason as well. We don't want another mess like the one Republicans had been 8 similar candidates each siphoned votes away from one another while the one **** head who stood out from the rest won with 25% of the votes.

Praxas said:

I think this should go above just two parties. I think we should allow 5 candidates period. Dem and rep (just because they are usually the biggest two) and then the next three largest garnering percentage independent candidates, whatever their percentage)

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I've always championed something of this sort, particularly in the national elections. I think each party can get to choose its candidates, but that the debates should not be limited to only the Republicans and Democrats. There should be spots for 4-5 party candidates, and you can take the ones which had the top 4-5 popular votes in the previous election. There's no point to artificially limit our choices to two, particularly since those "two" are not really all that different in action.

But it will not happen, the Republocrats want to maintain control and they have manipulated everything from campaign finance laws to the nationalized debates to ensure that only their rule is allowed to proceed.