competing for the republican presidential nomination this year. it was a strange decision in the first place when fox announced in may they would not allow all the candidates to debate. they would pick ten who would be allowed into the debate based on one metric only, based on national poll numbers even though national poll numbers at this point in a presidential primary are basically totally meaningless numbers. in years past they have had no predictive value at this point in the process in terms of who is going to go on to win the early states or who is ultimately going to win the nomination. it was a strange decision anyway for them to try to winnow down the field themselves using only national polls fully half a year -- more than half a year before the iowa caucuses, before any actual republican voters get to have their say. it was weird enough. fox news has face add lot of pressure over this decision and the republican party has faced a lot of pressure for letting fox do this to their presidential primary process. they could have just said, listen, we don't really want more than ten candidates on the stage at one time. that's unwieldy. instead, since we have this giant field of potentially viable candidates, we'll split them up, randomly assign half the candidates to one of the