CNN and GOP Need to Do Their Arithmetic

Those complaining about the way CNN is selecting candidates for the main event of the second GOP debate have a very good point. I’ve written before about the mistakes being made by Fox News in trying to conduct a live broadcast of a 17 person debate, but given that CNN is set to continue the same mistakes with two groups, the selection of those for the main event takes on even more importance for this second debate. CNN’s plans promise to compound the problems encountered by Fox. No lessons learned.

The complaint is that all the polls before (4 polls) and after (2 polls) the first Fox debate are simply averaged to determine the 10 leaders. This is biased against any change in the status of candidates. At minimum, the 4 polls before and the 2 polls after the first debate should be averaged to see who moves up and who moves down.

CNN falls back on the rules for an excuse to ignore this problem, but the rules they have drawn up with the GOP are blindingly biased. Please do the arithmetic and exercise some common sense.