Democrats ratchet up criteria for making the debate stage in 2020
The Democratic National Committee announced Friday that it will ratchet up poll performance and donation criteria for presidential candidates to qualify for the January debate in Iowa.
The debate, scheduled for Jan. 14, will be hosted by CNN in partnership with the Des Moines Register and held on the Drake University campus in Des Moines. It is slated to occur just weeks before Iowa’s Feb. 3 caucuses.
To qualify for the January, candidates must have:
- Received 5% or more support in at least four different polls, which may be national polls or state polls in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada. That’s up from 4% for the December debate, held Thursday night. To count toward qualification, each of the four polls must be conducted by different organizations or in different states. Alternatively, a candidate can quality if he or she receives 7% or more support in two single-state polls. That’s up from 6% for the December debate, and;
- Received donations from at least 225,000 total donors and at least 1,000 donors in at least 20 states. That’s up from 200,000 total donors and 800 donors in 20 states for the December debate.
The Iowa debate will be the seventh sanctioned by the DNC, which has set the debate criteria for each of the debates. Those criteria have attracted criticism because they have kept some candidates from national debate stages.
The December debate featured seven candidates out of a field of more than a dozen and just one candidate of color, businessman Andrew Yang.
“The DNC will not change the threshold for any one candidate and will not revert back to two consecutive nights with more than a dozen candidates,” DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said, according to CNN.
The DNC previously announced that the Jan. 14 date could move, based on the schedule of the expected impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate. Five U.S. senators are in the Democratic field.
MORE:What would a January impeachment trial mean for Iowa’s presidential debate?
This caucus cycle, the Democratic presidential debates began in June with 20 candidates split over two nights. In Dec. 2018, DNC officials said they expected there would be 12 debates, six in 2019 and six in 2020.
The Iowa debate will be the first of 2020.
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