Donald Trump quickly earned the scorn of many veterans' groups this weekend with his controversial comments about Sen. John McCain's military service.

But the irony is that the unpredictable Trump is still likely to make it into the Fox News debate next month. And if he does, he will quite possibly bump off the stage one of the only two Republican candidates who are military veterans: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The other veteran, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, is not close to the threshold for inclusion, but having neither Graham nor Perry on stage is sure to be an issue.

According to the Washington Post's most recent calculations, Perry just barely makes the cut for the Aug. 6 debate; the candidates on stage will be the top 10 from an average of the five latest national polls. Last week, Perry ranked 11th and looked like he would miss the debate, while Graham is further down. New polls are being released that could change that formula, but Perry is on the bubble.

The potential slight to the two Air Force veterans also comes at a time when national security is a big issue among voters. Now some Republicans are worrying about denying the vets' voice while giving Trump his greatest megaphone yet.

"It has the potential to become a sideshow on an important issue for Republican voters," said GOP strategist Ford O'Connell, who worked on McCain's 2008 campaign for president. "Graham and Perry pretty much stay above the fray. With Trump, he's just so unpredictable and is running an entire campaign on emotion."

Read more from Jessica Taylor at NPR

After Jeb Bush announced plans to run for president, his standing in a national survey got a 6 percentage-point bump. Donald Trump’s announcement meant an 11-point bump.

Chris Christie? No such bump.

Since New Jersey’s governor made it official June 30, his support has dropped to 2 percent from 4 percent in a nationwide Monmouth University poll with a 5.4 percentage-point error margin. He tied for ninth place with four other potential Republican primary candidates in a Fox News survey released the week before before his announcement.

As Christie on Thursday returns for a 12th time to New Hampshire, the first primary state, poll results put him in danger of missing the cutoff for the initial televised debate. Fox, which is hosting the Aug. 6 event in Cleveland, is limiting the stage to the top 10 candidates in an average of five national surveys.

So far, 15 Republicans have announced they are running for president. At least two more -- Ohio Governor John Kasich and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore -- plan to join in. 

“[Christie's] path to get back to the top tier is simple: He’s got to make that debate stage,” said Ford O’Connell, managing director of Washington communications firm Civic Forum Strategies and former campaign official for Republican John McCain. “If he doesn’t win New Hampshire, he’s dead in the water.”

Read more from Terrance Dopp at Bloomberg Politics

When it comes to its field of contenders for 2016, the GOP has a bit of a dilemma on its hands. The pack of possible candidates is crowded, to say the least, which has an upside and a downside. The upside is that it advertises the depth of the Republican Party in an election where the Democratic offerings are pretty much Hillary Clinton and those two other guys. The downside is that a race that looks likely to grow to as many as 16 candidates is beyond unwieldy.

Fox News, with the tacit assent of the Republican National Committee, has taken the first steps to limit the field, by announcing that only the top 10 candidates, by poll numbers, will get a spot in the first sanctioned debate this August in Cleveland.

At the same time, though, Republican political consultants look at the decision to limit the debate to 10 candidates as the worst of all worlds. The party can be slammed for restricting debate while still being stuck with a cumbersome corps of participants.

“You don’t want to kick anyone off the stage, but even the 10 that they’re capping at is too many,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “Really, you can’t do this with more than seven. Five is even a lot. They are trying to accommodate this as best they can.”

The early challenges for the GOP are obvious, said the Republican strategist O’Connell, but nothing is written in stone. Once the voters begin speaking, he said, the field may be limited by powers beyond the TV networks or the RNC

“The debate rules could very well change. Once we get to the Iowa caucus, the debate rules don’t matter anymore,” he said.

Read more from Rob Garver at The Fiscal Times

On Monday, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina became the sixth and seventh candidates to join the GOP presidential field. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is expected to make it eight on Tuesday, and another dozen candidates of varying degrees of credibility are jostling each other at the edge of the pool, deciding whether or not to jump in. 

Ask Republican activists about the increasingly crowded field, and you’ll hear happy talk about how “wide and deep” the GOP’s bench is. But it’s hard to believe that worries about an unwieldy primary field and visions of debate stages crammed with a dozen lecterns aren’t haunting the dreams of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. 

“You have the potential for it to become a circus up on the debate stage,” said Republican campaign strategist Ford O’Connell. “It’s going to be difficult to avoid that.” 

Here’s the problem: The presidential map is a tough one for the Republicans. The Democrats start with a huge Electoral College advantage when you divide up the states that reliably vote for each party. That means winning will require keeping all solidly Republican states red, and convincing multiple swing states that have recently gone to the Democrats to vote Republican instead. 

Doing that, in turn will require scraping together as many votes as possible. But if the GOP wants to drive turnout, it also needs to avoid offending voters in the early going by barring their chosen candidates – or at least candidates who speak directly to their concerns – from even getting a place on the debate stage. 

“That’s the problem right there,” O’Connell said. “To win the presidential election what Republicans have to do is increase their appeal to Hispanic voters, bring every white working class voter into the tent, and try to stop the bleeding with single women under 50.” 

Read more from Rob Graver at The Fiscal Times

The Republican National Committee’s push to limit the number of debates in the 2016 presidential primary could end up creating an arms race of sorts, with groups denied the chance to hold “official” debates instead hosting candidate forums that would serve much the same purpose.

Even as groups ponder how to handle the RNC’s new dictate, which will be formalized in the coming weeks, potential candidates say they’re open to participating in forums outside of the officially sanctioned debates, saying they are crucial to giving voters the chance to test their would-be nominees.

Some Republicans, especially in the party’s senior ranks, though, felt there were too many debates — intraparty clashes that diluted the party’s message and weakened eventual nominee Mitt Romney’s hand as he headed into the general election against President Obama.

The RNC is pushing to limit the number of debates.

Some RNC members said the challenge now will be for the party to figure out what constitutes an unsanctioned debate.

“As much as the Republican Party, rightfully so, wants to control the debates, the reality is that the networks have the upper hand, because a lot of candidates will want to boost up their name ID and be in everybody’s living rooms,” said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist. “By trying to basically control the debate process, they could be giving rise to a new round of sideshows.”

Read more from Seth McLaughlin at The Washington Times

From Charlie Cook at The National Journal:

Before the first presidential debate, it was easy to say that the face-offs usually don’t matter that much. One had to go back to 1976, 1980, and 1984 to find examples of a debate having a material effect on a presidential election. But that first debate earlier this month—specifically, Mitt Romney’s strong performance and President Obama’s weak one—had an impact that we are still seeing, even after the incumbent “won” the next two debates, if the instant polls are to be believed.

A strong performance in that first debate would have probably closed the sale for Obama. Instead, his lackluster showing shifted a bunch of voters who had seemed to be drifting gradually in his direction back into neutral, with some reversing course and moving into Romney’s column.

This race is still a challenge for Romney. Although tied nationally in this new NBC/WSJ and most other polling, he still carries a great deal of scar tissue in some of the swing states—most notably, Ohio and Wisconsin, but also Colorado and Iowa. Romney is clearly better situated to win the popular vote than the electoral vote; Obama is much closer than Romney to the magic 270 number in the Electoral College.

But this is a horse race, a very close one that can still go either way, and that was not the case before the first debate. The debates—and I would say all three of them—hit a reset button for Romney and put him back into this contest.

They say you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression. But after his abysmal performance at the first presidential tilt in Denver, President Barack Obama hopes he can do exactly that in the town-hall-style debate Tuesday night in Hempstead, N.Y.

But he's not the only candidate who needs a strong performance. Mitt Romney may have received "his best set of polls all year" last Friday, according to polling analyst Nate Silver of The New York Times. Still, if Romney is to win the White House—if he is to overcome the 15- to 20-point disadvantage he still faces in the Electoral College vote—he can't rest on his first debate success.

And he can't do it by attacking President Obama. The president and his record are not the focal points of this debate—the dozen or so undecided voters who will ask questions of the candidates are. Moderator Candy Crowley can inject herself as well, although neither candidate wants her to play a major role. But for the most part, both are at the mercy of the studio audience.

It is important for Romney to remember that style matters more than substance, that this isn't the place to explain in any extensive detail his economic plans and he should avoid trading barbs. This is not Denver. This is Oprah or The View. Listen. Understand. Exchange ideas.

To be successful Romney needs to focus on five items:

Read more from Ford O'Connell at U.S. News & World Report

Both U.S. presidential candidates’ ability to connect with viewers will be the most important aspect of Tuesday night’s presidential debate, which could give President Barack Obama an advantage over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, experts said.

Indeed, the debate’s town-hall forum is all about being folksy and portraying oneself as attuned to the needs of the average Americans, rather than paying attention to the finer points of policy.

As such, Obama has a natural advantage, as he apparently has always been able to connect better with his audience than Romney, who has at times come off as stiff and awkward in public, experts said.

“It’s a real dog and pony show,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “Town hall debates tend to favor style over substance.”

But it remains to be seen whether Romney has gotten over his public awkwardness, as Tuesday’s discussion will be much less about policy and mostly about each candidate presenting himself as someone who can relate to average voters. That means that Romney must avoid getting bogged down in tedious policy minutia, as he is known to do, noted O’Connell.

Read more at NZweek.com

Of course The Daily Caller report raises legitimate concerns.

But if things go poorly for Biden, he, unlike Obama, won't be able to blame it on the altitude.

Read more from Ford O'Connell at Politico's "The Arena"

Ford O'Connell joins CBC News to analyze Republican challenger Mitt Romney's winning performance in Denver against President Barack Obama in the first 2012 presidential debate.