Two of the three debates clash with National Football League games, and Trump tweeted Friday that Clinton and the Democrats were “trying to rig the debates”, though the debates were scheduled by the non-partisan commission that has been organizing presidential debates since 1988, McClatchy reports.
Advertisement
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are scheduled to debate September 26, but Trump is anxious that Drew Brees and “Monday Night Football” will come between them and high ratings.
“The debates are going to be pretty massive from what I understand”, Trump said.
Miller was asked directly by “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter whether Trump would seek to change the schedule in negotiations about the debates with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Commission on Presidential Debates.
An NFL spokesman said in a statement, however, “We did not write a letter, but we obviously prefer the debates on a different night than scheduled games”.
While Trump has accused Clinton of trying to bury the debates so not as many viewers tune in, the schedule is actually selected by a bipartisan group called Commission on Presidential Debates.
The first debate goes up against a Monday Night Football game between the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons, while the second debate is up against the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants.
However, there were plenty of conflicts in all of those years with Major League Baseball playoff games.
It’s fair to expect that the debate scheduled for October 9, 2016, opposite NBC’s “Sunday Night Football”, will suffer some in the ratings vs. the others. The organization announced the upcoming debates on September 23, 2015. “A debate has never been rescheduled as a result”.
“Mr Trump has made it very clear as recently as Friday: he wants the debates”. She doesn’t maybe like she did with Bernie Sanders where they were on Saturday nights when nobody’s home. On the same day, Trump also brought the issue up during an ABC interview on his upcoming debates against Clinton.
Trump did well enough in the primary debates because he had to fill only a few minutes of time in each one, sharing the stage with a dozen or so rivals.
In a thinly veiled attempt to say that debates matter more than football, the commission noted that more than 1,000 NFL games are played every four years, versus just four general election debates over that same period.
Advertisement
The official presidential debate schedule has been released, and Donald Trump is not happy. A non-profit, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has been organizing presidential and vice presidential debates since 1987. Many critics believed that the Democratic National Committee sought to minimize the debate schedule, thereby favoring Clinton over Sanders. He had skipped one of the debates to do a fundraiser for veterans charities. Given that nobody in a position of authority at the league is backing up the claim, I have no idea why he would have said that, but it’s equally true that the NFL isn’t wild about the plan.
