Commission: Presidential Debate Schedule Cannot Revolve Around NFL

ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” last season averaged close to 13 million viewers while NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” has been the most-watched prime time program for several years and last season averaged more than 21 million viewers. “Unacceptable!” Trump said in a July 29 tweet. If Trump bailed, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson would probably be tapped to take his place. He says he will not take part in a rigged debate. It operates independently of the political campaigns.

As is his way, the Republican nominee tweeted his displeasure about the debate schedule late Friday night. “The DNC hack showed you that the Clinton campaign was working to schedule debates against Sanders which have the least possible viewing audience….” RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer seconded it in an interview on CNN Saturday morning, and added, “The entire system needs to be re-looked at”.

“So we’re going to sit down with the commission in the next week or so and we’re going to start talking to them and we want to make sure we have a broad audience, understanding, watching the debates”, Manafort told CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

Its leadership is bipartisan.

The commission is led by both Republicans and Democrats. As for the accusation that Hillary Clinton cooked up the scheme, that’s a bit of a stretch as well. For example, there is former Sen.

The independent, nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates serves as the debate sponsor and sets the participation criteria, dates, sites and formats. If all of his conditions aren’t met, Trump will threaten to hold his own event on debate night. The four 2008 debates included two Thursdays Fridays, one Monday Wednesday and one Tuesday.

Three presidential debates are scheduled between Trump, the Republican nominee, and Clinton, the Democratic nominee – September 26, October 9 and October 19. On both nights, baseball playoff games also aired – TBS and TNT on Oct. 11 and FOX on Oct. 22; FOX did not air the Oct. 22 debate.

In a statement, the Commission said, “It is impossible to avoid all sporting events, and there have been nights which debates and games occurred in most election cycles”.

Amid Trump’s many controversial moments over the past week, it came to light that two of the three presidential debates are scheduled for the same nights as nationally televised NFL games. It also played out on social media that Trump never really got a letter from the National Football League about this, though it would prefer to have the debates on another night.

There have been controversies surrounding the CPD and presidential contests in the past, including whether third-party candidates should be included. “Why are the debates against, ‘” he told Stephanopoulos. Clinton one-on-one will be challenging. This may be his reason on the dates being conflicted with some of the National Football League games.