September 21, 2015 01:48 PM UTC

GOP To CU Student Body: Be Seen But Not Heard

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Boulder Daily Camera’s Alex Burness reported this weekend, requests to allow more University of Colorado students to attend next month’s Republican presidential debate at the Coors Events Center have fallen on deaf ears:

The Oct. 28 event in Boulder, titled “Your Money, Your Vote” and televised by CNBC, will be held in the 11,000-seat Coors Events Center on the University of Colorado campus, but the audience will be capped at about 1,000, and nearly all those chairs are already spoken for.

“One of the things people need to keep in mind,” Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s chief spokesman, said Friday, “is that this is a television production more than anything else. It’s a major, major event, but it’s mostly focused on being seen by the tens of millions of people who are watching.”

…Though CU is hosting the event, the school will only squeak in a few dozen of its own.

Liberal group ProgressNow Colorado, who led calls last month for more debate tickets to go to CU students, is predictably unhappy:

“It’s outrageous that the Republican Party has chosen to shut University of Colorado students out of the October presidential debate on their own campus,” said ProgressNow Colorado executive director Amy Runyon-Harms. “The Republican Party is partnering with the University of Colorado to host this debate, co-opting the good name of Colorado’s flagship university to provide a forum for Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and the rest of the GOP’s out-of-touch presidential candidates. Now we know that the GOP is afraid to let anyone but a hand-picked audience see them.”

“What is the Republican National Committee so afraid of that they have to lock the CU student body out of this debate?” asked Runyon-Harms. “A hand-picked audience clapping politely at the Coors Events Center while Donald Trump insults women and Ben Carson insults Muslims would be an insult to the intelligence of every University of Colorado student. The millions of viewers watching this debate deserve to see and hear how real people respond to these presidential candidates. Anything less is worthless political theater, and a misuse of the University of Colorado’s reputation for open and accessible dialogue on the issues.”

There are two ways to look at this situation. On the one hand, as the RNC claims, the debate is arguably about the televised audience, not the crowd in attendance. And the Daily Camera reports that the last two GOP presidential debates only utilized a small fraction of the available capacity of the venue they were held in. You might even go a step beyond a logistical benefit of the doubt, and say defensibly that the RNC has the “right” to invite anyone they want to “their” debate.

But is it good politics to only give out tickets to a tenth of a venue’s capacity, when thousands of CU students would gladly fill those empty seats? That’s where this gets a lot trickier for the RNC, especially with liberals making an issue of those empty seats. We don’t buy the argument that college students would necessarily be disruptive of the debate, though their reactions even within a permitted range of applause and other vocalizations might indeed be something Republicans would want to avoid. Either way, we don’t believe a full Coors Events Center would create any technical problems for the televised broadcast.

Once you get past those objections, there’s really not much left except things the RNC doesn’t want to discuss. Like why those students would be repelled by things the candidates might say.

“There’s no fee paid to reserve the venues, but the publicity value is going to be quite substantial,” [CU spox Bronson Hilliard] said. “The PR value of having the campus continually referred to, the exterior shot that will start the debate, the sustained coverage inside the venue — if you were to pay for all of that in terms of advertising value, it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

And that’s where this becomes tricky for everybody, including the University of Colorado. On the one hand, the university freely claims a six-digit PR value for hosting this debate on the CU-Boulder campus. For Republicans, hosting a debate on this historically liberal college campus has a much higher value in terms of legitimizing their field of candidates.

Once voters realize that the picturesque CU-Boulder campus is being used strictly as a backdrop, and that the students and faculty who make the place what it is are being excluded from attending the debate when they could easily be accommodated, we’d say the “PR value” drops substantially for both CU and the GOP.