The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Friday that Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein didn’t make the cut for the September 26 showdown because neither reached a minimum 15 percent threshold in major national polls.
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Under the commission’s rules, Johnson and Stein each needed to average at least 15 percent support in the most recent polls of five national polling organizations to be included. As he says, most pollsters first ask voters to choose between Clinton and Trump, and don’t include either his name or Green Party candidate Jill Stein until later in the survey. Only Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump will take part in the September 26 nationally televised debate.
Johnson and Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee, were left out.
“The criteria will be reapplied to all candidates in advance of the second and third presidential debates”, the commission said in a statement on its website.
He’s a gun-nut, an anti-vaxxer/anti-taxxer, a foreign policy genius, and the guy Washington Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant said he’d consider after finally disavowing Donald Trump.
For now, third-party supporters feel safe continuing to voice their discontent by backing Johnson, Skelley said.
Johnson has publicly said that being excluded from the debates would doom his campaign. Mike Pence of IN and Democratic Sen.
The commission, citing the averages the various candidates have achieved in selected polls, confirmed that Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton had met the criteria. Politico reported that Clinton’s campaign operatives are anxious Johnson’s success in those states could hand them over to Trump.
Johnson, once a Republican governor of New Mexico, has pinned his hopes on taking part in the debates.
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“At the time of its creation, the leaders of those two parties made no effort to hide the fact that they didn’t want any third-party intrusions into their shows”, Johnson said. The debate would have offered Johnson and Stein the largest audiences of their campaigns.
