Gabbard had argued that the corporate news media and Democratic National Committee were working together to influence the event. On Monday, she offered little explanation of why she had dropped her objection to participating. “I just want to let you know that I will be attending the debate,” she wrote in an email to supporters.
While Gabbard had met the qualifying criteria to participate in Tuesday’s debate, she is among the lower-polling candidates and has struggled to gain traction, never breaking 3% in any major poll. She failed to qualify for the September debate and has not yet made the stage for the November faceoff. The New York Times is a co-sponsor of Tuesday’s debate with CNN.
Gabbard has disputed the polls selected by the national committee as “certifying” candidates for the debate, arguing that many of the noncertified surveys are more accurate. Those polls could also help Gabbard qualify for the November debate.
Her call won support from a fellow primary candidate, Marianne Williamson, who is also polling among the bottom tier of presidential hopefuls.
“I have great respect for Tulsi for saying such inconvenient truth,” Williamson posted on Twitter last week, after Gabbard first raised the idea of boycotting the debate.
Gabbard’s warnings of a rigged election are likely to resonate with her base, an unconventional mix of anti-interventionist progressives, libertarians, contrarian culture-war skeptics, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They like her isolationist foreign policy, her calling out of what she sees as censorship in the major technology platforms and her support for drug decriminalization.
Buoyed by frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, her quixotic, bare-bones campaign has also won praise from some surprising admirers, including Stephen K. Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist; former Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian star; and Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, who has said he finds her “refreshing.”
Gabbard has lobbed some of the toughest attacks on the debate stage. In July, she assailed Sen. Kamala Harris of California over her record as a prosecutor, becoming the most searched candidate on Google in the hours after the event.
Harris later shot back, calling Gabbard an “apologist” for Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, whom Gabbard controversially visited in Damascus in January 2017.
A telegenic military veteran, Gabbard, once a Democratic darling, began falling out of party favor during President Barack Obama’s administration, when she picked a series of high-profile fights over foreign policy, joining Republicans in demanding that Obama use the term “radical Islam.”
In 2016, she resigned her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. She has said that she believes that the primary was “rigged” by the party committee against Sanders.
This year’s qualifying criteria were designed by the national committee as a direct response to criticism leveled during the 2016 campaign by supporters of Sanders, who argued that the party committee organized the debate schedule to favor Clinton, the eventual party nominee.
While some lower-polling candidates have expressed frustration with the qualification rules, particularly the requirement that candidates amass at least 165,000 unique donors to make the November debate stage, there has been little outcry from Democratic voters.
In June, nearly 3 out of 4 voters who planned to attend the Iowa caucuses said that at least several of the candidates should drop out of the race, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa poll. A little more than four months later, only four of the candidates have ended their bids, leaving 19 remaining in the race.
This article originally appeared in
.