make that it seems like the party is protecting hillary clinton. al hunt, are they rigging the debate process for hillary clinton? yeah, sure they are. see, that s why we love al. that s why we love al. go ahead. joe, i think, by the way, that o malley exaggerates the importance. the problem democrats has is they should have a different chairperson. debbie wasserman shultz is not doing anything the democrats need to do, organizationally and she s not an effective chairperson. debates are secondaryi issue, ad money, fund-raising. how are they doing? not doing well. let s go to the republican side of the ledger. new polls in iowa that donald trump completely transformed the perception among the early nominating states, likely republican caucusgoers. look at these numbers. bloomberg politics, des moines register poll finds trump leading the field with 23%. retired neurosurgeon ben carson
not have them. governor martin o malley tore in to the democratic national committee on friday, as you know, accusing the party of rigging the debate process to favor hillary clinton. do you agree with governor o malley? i think rigging is a strong word. i think that at a time when so many of our people have given up on the political process. when 80% of young people did not vote in the last election, 63% of all americans did not vote, i think debates are a good thing. i think love debates. so i would like to see more deba debates. i would like to see groups representing working people have a debate to talk about why the rich get richer and everybody else gets poorer. i think environmentalists deserve a debate so we could talk about how we move aggressively to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel. i think young people deserve a debate. in terms of my idea and other ideas about how we make college education in this country in
i think we covered a lot of territory. and we re starting to see people being able to make choices. let me ask you about this issue. it is an internal intramural battle in the republican party. you stood to defund and get rid of obamacare and you were kind of excoriated by members of your own party i supported you. in effort. i want to be straight up with my audience here. and i was surprised others didn t support you. so do you think this is an intramural squabble? will this be resolved in this presidential race? i think the really divide is whether we ll have republicans that actually do what we said we would do. and the virtue of this debate process is we have the opportunity to really put candidates to a test. in every campaign there are campaign conservatives. all ten of the people on that stage will naturally say they re the most conservative person ever. but i think what republican primary voters are looking for is consistent conservatives.
were at 1% now we re up to 5%. it s the early states that determine this campaign. so we have good stuff on the ground in iowa and we have a good organization but voters can t be informed by a limited debate process. so let s ask the people if they think it s right that party bosses limit the debates for a vote that we cast that s personal as president of the united states. this process has shown time and time again the candidates that the rest of the country perhaps had never heard of emerge in the early states. why? because that s the those are the places where the voters had the opportunity to see the candidates exchange ideas, to stay where they stand on issues like wall street reform or these bad trail deals that we keep entering into that send jobs abroad. they see are issues that the candidates need to stand up and
they know it s too big and the longer it goes on with 15 or 16 or 17 candidates, the more negative attacks you ll have candidate against candidates. why did they want to reduce the number of debates? they believe mitt romney was weakened by the debate process in 2012 when many of those candidates survived for a long time and attacked romney pretty intensely for months and months. they wanted to prevent that this time. they wanted to winnow the field but they didn t want to do it because the committee would get the blame for excluding candidates, so instead they said to the networks, you come up with a process. it s okay. whatever you do we ll rubber stamp, it s all right. the networks, of course, also didn t want to make the decision to exclude candidates. so that s how they picked the polling process because they can blame it on the polls. americans love precision. they love numbers, and that s