Candidates had until 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday to meet the Democratic National Committee’s qualification requirements: amassing 130,000 individual donors and receiving 2% support in at least four qualifying polls.
Even after two new polls were released Wednesday morning, only 10 candidates made the cut, meaning they can all fit on one stage under rules set by the DNC. Those candidates are:
— Former Vice President Joe Biden
— Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey
— Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana
— Julián Castro, the former housing secretary
— Sen. Kamala Harris of California
— Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota
— Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas
— Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
— Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur
The debate will be held in Houston on Sept. 12 from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern time and will be broadcast on ABC and Univision. The moderators will be George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Jorge Ramos.
The candidates will have 1 minute and 15 seconds to answer questions, and 45 seconds for responses and rebuttals. There will be opening statements but no closing statements.
It was about twice as difficult to qualify for this debate as it was for the first two sets of debates, and exactly half as many candidates qualified.
The one-night format means the leading candidates will all share the stage for the first time. Because of the size of the previous debate fields, two of the highest-polling candidates, Biden and Warren, have yet to face each other directly.
But the format also means that, once again, 10 candidates will be jostling for speaking time — a situation that can lend itself more to sound bites than to in-depth, well, debate. For that reason, some observers had been hoping for two debate nights with five or six candidates apiece.
Several candidates who didn’t make the cut criticized the DNC’s requirements, saying the committee was unnecessarily narrowing the field with five months still to go before the Iowa caucuses.
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday, said the debate would be “missing something” by not including him. Bullock, who often emphasizes that he is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has won a statewide race in a state that voted for President Donald Trump, said there would be no “rural voice” onstage.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Tom Perez, the DNC chairman, an adviser to Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado complained that the committee had “not provided information on how or why its unprecedented debate qualification requirements were set nor what the criteria will be for the eight future debates.”
The DNC is accepting polls from 16 organizations for the debate qualifications, and some highly regarded pollsters are not on the list. Several more candidates, including the billionaire investor Tom Steyer and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, might have qualified for the debate if more polls had been counted. But a larger list would not have helped Bennet or Bullock, because neither has met the donor requirement.
Some lesser-known candidates have criticized the donor requirement, too, arguing that it creates an incentive to focus on fundraising rather than voter outreach. It seems, though, that 130,000 donors was actually an easier bar to clear than 2% support in four polls.
Four candidates — Gabbard, Steyer, self-help author Marianne Williamson and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who ended his campaign last week — met the donor threshold but not the polling threshold. Nobody, by contrast, met the polling threshold without meeting the donor threshold.
Steyer got three of the four polls he needed, but failed to reach 2% support in either of the polls released Wednesday morning. Gabbard hit that mark in two polls, and Williamson in one.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who ended her campaign Wednesday, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who also dropped out recently and is now running for Senate, were the only other candidates to reach 2% in a qualifying poll.
Steyer, Gabbard and others who didn’t make the cut for September could still qualify for the fourth debate, which will be held in October. They have until two weeks before that debate — whose date hasn’t been announced yet — to meet the current criteria. (After that, the DNC may raise the qualifications bar yet again.)
So don’t get too excited about the one-night format. The second night will probably be back a month later.
This article originally appeared in
.