The commission will look at poll numbers again before deciding who qualifies for the second and third presidential debates in October.
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The Commission on Presidential Debates announced on Friday which candidates will be invited to the first debate on September 26th.
The non-profit Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has invited both Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee, and Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee, to debate at Hofstra University in NY on September 26.
There are three presidential debates scheduled, the first of which kicks off September 26 on NBC. Johnson, who has acknowledged he has little chance of becoming president if he is not allowed to debate, has started a petition that collected more than 800,000 signatures urging the commission to include him.
According to Mark Dankof, a former third-party US Senate candidate, third-party presidential candidates in the US face “insurmountable obstacles” from the two major political parties, as well as from wealthy corporations and the mainstream media. “I don’t think a lot of people have that distinct memory of Perot, so they’re used to these elections where a certain number of people say they’re going to vote for third party and then a week before the race comes, all of a sudden they say, ‘Oh, gosh, but that would waste my vote.’ So they change”.
I would say I am surprised that the CPD has chosen to exclude me from the first debate, but I’m not. Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, have made a recent push for inclusion in the debates, including a full-page ad in Wednesday’s New York Times. On average, more than half of voters surveyed do not know enough about Johnson or Stein to form an opinion, according to the Huffington Post’s poll tracker. More significantly, who will not be there: Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Before the announcement, Team Clinton was in panic mode over third parties siphoning votes from its candidate.
The Stein campaign has not released a statement.
But it’s this kind of civil disobedience that many this year are more attracted to because they’re sick with the two-party system, which is something else Dr. Jill Stein has debated over throughout the year. She’d be in deep trouble in that scenario, faced with defections among Obama’s coalition at the very moment that white college grads seem to be coming home to Trump and the GOP.
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Candidates were required to reach 15% support in a selection of national polls to qualify, which means the Green Party’s Jill Stein also failed to win an invitation.
