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Comment by i_am_nomad | Hacker News Reader

Ha ha ha ha, no. He qualifies for the first debate because the DNC allows him to. If they didn’t want him there, they’d bend and rewrite the rules to prevent it. Witness Larry Lessig’s experience with this:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/1...

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Non-amp link: https://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9659014/lawrence-lessig-quits-...

Thank you, I’m sorry about that.

My recollection is that Lessig was pretty clear from the start that he was running just to raise the prominence of his position on campaign finance, not to actually become president. IIRC he said he would resign after passing one bill.

I can see why party leadership would choose not to participate in what was, from their perspective, a stunt--not a serious campaign for the White House.

I don't understand why the above comment was downvoted.

The point is that they changed the rules out from under him.

It's correct that they changed the rules to exclude him and most people don't like that in principal. But it's also true that he was not a serious candidate because he said he wanted one bill passed and then he'd resign the presidency, and that one bill wouldn't make it through congress anyway.

> that one bill wouldn't make it through congress anyway

To be fair to Lessig, if the single issue "pass this bill" candidate was actually elected President, congress would feel a lot of pressure to comply.

Why would congress feel pressure just to do what the president wants? Presidents claim all kinds of mandates when they are elected, congress often goes it's own way.

Congress would feel pressured to do what their constituents want. If we imagine Lessig winning, so clearly focused on a single issue, we also must imagine an awful lot of voters clearly willing to vote based on that issue. Desire to claim those votes rather than driving then to their opponents would be the pressure in question. There's still no guarantee, to be sure, but it's clearly more likely post-Lessig-win than on the face of it.

Most republicans would not feel pressure to support the supposed mandate behind a democratic president. Today, they'd actively go against it in most cases. It goes the other way too. That's why few democrats support the president or republican agendas.

I just don't see it that way at all. Think about Obama's work on national health care. A ton of democrats were worried about supporting it.

Again, there's a difference between a normal candidate claiming a mandate, when in reality many voted for other reasons, and a genuinely single issue candidate like Lessig.

> Congress would feel pressured to do what their constituents want.

Yes, but Presidents aren't elected by majority vote of voters in a majority of Congressional Districts. That's especially true of Democratic candidates, who tend to be hyperconcentrated in urban districts (in part, gerrymandering, but in part that's just the geographic distribution of Democratic support and why even without state-size biases and gerrymandering, Democrats are structurally disadvantaged by single-member, FPTP representation in Congress.)

Certainly, although some of that applies to the presidential election too. To be clear, I didn't mean to imply any kind of sure thing. Just that looking at the likelihood of Congress to pass the bill in the current setting should be expected to underestimate its performance in the wake of the election under discussion.

To be fair to accuracy, members of Congress who campaigned against the bill (as any who planned to oppose it would likely to be forced to of a major party nominee had it as their entire platform, since the question would be undodgeable) would face no meaningful pressure to vote for it, as their constituents would have weighed and accepted their opposition.

Yes, anyone who is elected actively campaigning against the bill would presumably not feel any pressure to vote for it.

Maybe they don't want to turn him into a martyr like they did with Bernie.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16599036/d...

Martyrdom is easy to avoid. They could have just not rigged the game against Bernie, then he would have won all the caucus states, he would have won California, he would have won at the convention, and he would have beaten Trump handily.

Also, the donation counter on his page was fake - it was simply a time-based counter done in JS, and the code took the time from local PC, not the server - if you'd change time on your pc to future (couple days) and refresh the page, donation count would go up.

I've read that this is standard practice because they only get authorized counts from the DNC once every 24hrs. So it's just an estimate that is reconciled daily.

They are allowing 20 people on stage. At a certain point, you have to cut off the line.

I'm fine with saying "top twenty candidates". And I like the idea of splitting it into two debates and randomly selecting who goes where, rather than the "kiddie table" nonsense the GOP did with their large field in 2015.

As a detractor of many of the "kiddie table" participants in 2015, I did have some schadenfreude at the whole situation at least, so there was that redeeming quality.

But no candidate really deserves to be treated that way, so I also like the idea of randomly splitting.

The Republican Party had daytime ("junior varsity", as 538 put it) and nighttime debates during their crowded primaries in 15/early 16.

Lessig was never a serious candidate. I'm not sure what your point is: Obviously the Democratic party decides who they invite to a debate that they're hosting.

If the DNC sets a policy that candidates meeting certain objective criteria can debate, they should uphold that policy. Otherwise they should be transparent about how candidates are admitted.

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