The Republican Party held its third debate of the primary race for the 2016 presidential nomination Wednesday. I tuned in, hoping to gain further insight on the Republican candidate field. With my first participation as a voter in the presidential election coming up in 2016, I want to be as informed as possible. Much to my displeasure, I found that this would be difficult to accomplish because the debate quickly turned into a largely non-informative, convoluted mess with candidates spending far too much time talking over one another, arguing with the moderators and complaining about a lack of airtime. As I spent the greater part of two hours watching the candidates arguing over coverage rather than talking about real political issues, one thing became very clear to me: the GOP — whether by candidate concession or general restructuring — needs to consolidate its candidate field.

Consolidating will accomplish a number of things. For one, fewer candidates will mean more airtime for each candidate, eliminating all the bickering that digresses from the actual debate. Most importantly, doing so will also free up time to cover more issues in the debate. In FiveThirtyEight’s coverage, Farai Chideya noted about halfway through the debate that many issues remained largely untouched, and Leah Libresco likewise observed: “It’s hard for the moderators to reach everyone with so many people on stage. Every candidate has only gotten one question.” These observations exemplify two huge problems that my suggested decrease in candidates would solve: more coverage of key issues and a deeper understanding of each participants’ views. What’s the point of having a debate of 10 participants if, within the first hour of the debate, we’ve only heard from each participant once?

This solution may also solve deeper-rooted problems for the GOP than just the organization; it can also allow the GOP to develop a unified national identity. In the week when the GOP nominated Paul Ryan for the speaker of the House and then subsequently had 45 Republicans vote against him in the first vote, FiveThirtyEight published an article with stats saying the Republican Party is in disarray. In addition to that, Jeb Bush’s attack on Marco Rubio called into question the most amicable intra-GOP relationship, and endorsements from fellow politicians have seemingly come to a halt — more proof that the GOP is disorganized and divided. The vast field of candidates — double the size of that in 2012 and 2008 — further emphasizes this divide. One of the two majority political parties in the United States does not have a clear identity or a semblance of a majority front-runner. As a right-leaning voter, this is deeply unsettling: I have no clue what to expect from the Republican nominee. However, if the GOP national leadership were to work to narrow the field of candidates to a few that represented a united Republican front, then success in 2016 would seem more probable.

The obvious counterargument is that the vast field of GOP candidates is actually beneficial, because it allows primary voters to determine the best possible candidate. However, what we’ve found has been quite the opposite: We are just a few months away from the Iowa caucuses and this has yet to even remotely happen; only a handful of participants have dropped out and it appears the GOP is nowhere closer to narrowing the field than they were before the first debate.

Consolidation is clearly easier said than done. The fact that there has yet to be a candidate with majority share of the polls, and even the candidates polling the highest — Ben Carson and Donald Trump — have yet to convince analysts they are viable contenders for the nomination makes the decision that much harder. However, despite the difficulty in doing so, the GOP national leadership needs to make tough decisions in order to represent itself as a unified and electable political party.

Jacob Altstadt is a McCormick junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.