GOP bigs are reportedly anxious about the size of their Presidential field – both the possibility that not all the contenders will fit on the stage, and the possibility that a great many of these contenders lack basic plausibility. I mean, just take a look at the list of announced or likely candidates: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, Scott Walker. And then we may yet hear from Bob Ehrlich, Jim Gilmore, Peter King, Herman Cain, Mike Pence, Rick Scott, Allen West, John Bolton, Sarah Palin, Joe Scarborough, Steve King, Nikki Haley and I don’t know who all else who’s been speculated about here or there at one time or another.

In a normal political party, said bigs would simply pull the less-plausible candidates aside and let them know that this isn’t their year, and said candidates would quietly fold up their tents – perhaps with the exception of one or two gadflies who ran anyway to represent a particular faction or tendency. But of course, the GOP isn’t a normal party, and nothing would draw more popular support for a candidate from the reverse-snobbery caucus than knowledge that that candidate had been excluded by the “establishment” from the mere opportunity to make his or her case.

So: what to do when your party becomes a reality show?

Clearly: run it like a reality show.

My modest proposal: instead of having one set of debates with the whole clown car on stage, you have two sets of debates. One is for the top-tier, the “inner circle” of candidates who are actually interested in running for and have a shot at becoming President. The second set of debates is for, well, the rest of the field.

For the first debate, let’s say the two groups are determined exclusively by poll numbers – you’d need some objective metric, and that’s as good a metric as any, particularly since we’re not actually excluding anybody from debates altogether. Let’s say we put the top eight polling candidates in the first tier and the rest in the second tier. Then we have our first debate for each group.

And then we enter “survivor” mode.

Each group of candidates – inner circle and outer circle – votes for which candidate from their number should move from their current group to the other group (with voting for yourself being inadmissible). Whichever candidate gets voted out of the inner circle gets dumped down to the clown car for the next debate. But a replacement candidate gets promoted up from the clown car to the big leagues. Rinse and repeat.

The interesting thing, to me, about this is that both groups would start out with some “real” candidates and some jokes. Based on the average of recent polls the top tier would be Bush, Walker, Rubio, Paul, Huckabee, Cruz, Carson and Christie. There’s ample representation for the fringes in that group. And the second-tier debates would include veteran politicians like John Kasich and Rick Perry along with the likes of Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina. So the “top-tier” candidates couldn’t ignore the kooks, and the “also-ran” candidates would have a real shot to stand out and earn promotion, without any individual stage being too crowded.

Or would demotion and promotion work based on “merit” like that? The incentives in this game could be very interesting. At the end of the first “top tier” debate, who would the various candidates most want to send back to the minor leagues? Maybe Christie gets better traction with a live audience than people expected – so Bush, Walker and Rubio all vote him off the island to remove him as a threat. On the other hand, maybe Bush and Cruz are both strategically more worried about Rubio than they are about anybody else, so they make an agreement to vote him off. Or maybe Huckabee, Cruz, Christie and Rubio all agree to vote off Bush in a symbolic de-throning that makes a mockery of the whole “top-tier/second-tier” concept.

It seems likely that the top-tier candidates would collude to vote off whoever they perceive to be the biggest threat. But that candidate wouldn’t actually be gone – he’d just be speaking in a different time slot. Perhaps he’d dominate there, and get only more popular where it counts – with voters? And what about the second-tier candidates? Who would they vote to promote to the inner circle? Well, it really depends on what they are playing for. If Huckabee gets sent down, they might collude to send him back – lest he play the Fox host game better than they can. But if Bush gets sent down, they might never send him back to the big leagues – better to spend the rest of the debate season beating up on this year’s embodiment of the supposed establishment.

I suppose you could play the game such that instead of the candidates voting on who to dump or promote, a poll of the viewing audience determines it. That would perhaps be less ruthless – but might still make for interesting dynamics, because you’d expect there to be a somewhat different audience for the “real” debates and the “clown car” debates. Would the “clown” audience vote to promote their tribune – even if that turns out to be Donald Trump? Or would they vote to promote whoever they didn’t want to watch anymore – even if that turns out to be Bobby Jindal?

At some point, you’d have to winnow down the top tier even further – certainly by the time there is actual voting going on. But here’s the thing: you’d never have to winnow down the clown car. Even candidates who stopped campaigning in the actual Presidential race could stay in on some nominal basis so as to be able to continue to participate in the “people’s debates” – and continue to represent their issues, criticize the actual serious candidates, and audition for the talk show they no doubt prefer to host to being President. In fact, there would be no reason to ever stop the “people’s debates” – you could run them all year, every year, and only start promoting when an election is impending.

Splitting the field in this way would allow the GOP to have its ratings and eat them too, populism-wise. The “elite” candidates would undoubtedly deny that there was any qualitative difference between the two pools, claiming that the division was entirely an artifact of practical concerns – size of the stage, giving everyone enough time to speak, etc. Meanwhile, the “clown car” candidates could loudly proclaim their lack of interest in being “chosen” for some “establishment” clique, that indeed they are proud to remain where the candidates are real Americans. And hey: it’s not like anyone would have to get less air time than anybody else. Heck, the clown car might even get bigger audience. And if they didn’t – if the Fox audience tuned out the “non-serious” debates, wouldn’t that be salutary, a minor way of de-fanging the tiger of tele-populist rage?

The GOP wants to be a big tent. It worries it’s turning into a three-ring circus. But maybe, multiple rings are exactly what this circus needs.