The Daily Beast reports that sources tell it the Democratic National Committee (DNC) will announce its debate schedule this week. According to the report, six debates will be scheduled for this fall, and the candidates and media organizations that violate the schedule will be punished.
This should answer the complaint many have had that the Democrats are playing catch up to the Republicans. However, analysts have offered that there is a practical reason behind the slow start of the Democratic debating season.
The problem was that there weren’t enough announced candidates to announce a debating schedule as early on the Democratic side as there were on the Republican side. The Republicans having candidates numbering into the teens is an advantage in scheduling the debates because they know they have people to debate. They have even had to go so far as to bar candidates and create cutoffs to limit the participants in their debates.
Counter to that, Hillary Clinton announced in May and the party did not have a formally declared candidate before then.
“If we had tried to hold debates in April 2015 we would have had no candidates. The Republicans are starting in August, we will start in the fall, and I think both parties felt this was the right balance,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, told the Daily Beast.
