Democrats’ debates field set at 20
First events take place June 26-27 in Miami
The Democratic National Committee announced Thursday that 20 candidates have qualified for the party’s first presidential debates later this month.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts were the only major candidates out of the two dozen Democratic hopefuls who failed to meet the polling or grassroots fundraising measures required to get a debate spot. Two lesser-known candidates, former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam, also missed the cutoff.
Miami will host the campaign’s opening debates, set for June 26-27. An NBC News drawing Friday will divide the large field between the first and second debate night. Party officials have promised to weight the drawing with the intention of ensuring that top tier and lagging candidates are spread roughly evenly over the two nights.
Some candidates have criticized the debate-qualifying rules that the party chairman, Tom Perez, set this year.
The polling and fundraising thresholds will remain the same for the July debates over two nights in Detroit.
Bullock’s campaign insists he has reached a party benchmark of a minimum 1 percent in at least three polls by approved organizations. But party officials say Bullock is wrongly counting a Washington POST-ABC poll from February.
He said Thursday that he was “certainly disappointed” by the DNC’S decision.
“But the greater point really is also that I’m the only one in the field that’s actually won in a Trump state, and we need to win back some of the places we’ve lost,” he said on MSNBC.
The polling and fundraising marks will double for the third and fourth debates in September and October. Candidates will have to meet both marks instead of one or the other. That means 2 percent in the approved polls and a donor list of at least 130,000 unique contributors.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who will appear in the first debates, questioned some of the rules during a campaign stop Thursday before the DNC announcement but said candidates have little choice other than to meet them.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail Thursday:
Hickenlooper attacked rival Bernie Sanders’ vision of an America remade under democratic socialism and chastised others in the 2020 race for not repudiating that political philosophy. The former Colorado governor said Sanders was “wrong” to call for policies such as “Medicare for All,” which would dramatically increase public spending and government involvement in Americans’ daily lives. Hickenlooper called for less expansive changes to the “regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years.”
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro told Fox News that White House adviser Kellyanne Conway should be fired for violating the Hatch Act — the same federal law that Castro himself was found to have violated in 2016. The Democratic presidential candidate’s comments came in a
Fox News town hall in Tempe, Ariz. Separately, the Democrat defended the Hillary Clinton campaign’s decision to fund an opposition research dossier written by a British ex-spy, even as he condemned President Donald Trump for saying this week that he would be open to opposition research from foreign actors.
Anita Hill said in an NBC interview that she would be open to voting for former Vice President Joe Biden if he wins the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Hill, who testified in 1991 that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, has criticized Biden for his handling of the hearings. Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.