There is a 15 percent polling average threshold the commission sets, based on five polls of its choosing. As seen by the recent CPD decision to exclude third-party candidates, the system is already predisposed toward protecting the two major parties.
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Johnson and Stein could still qualify to appear in the second and third presidential debates, on 9 October at Washington University in St Louis and on 19 October at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
Johnson averaged only 8.4 percent, and Stein came in at 3.2 percent, according to the commission.
InstagramA number of new polls show Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson doing very well with millennials and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton underperforming with the same demographic that helped President Obama build winning coalitions in 2008 and 2012.
The commission said Friday it would not invite the two candidates to the debate scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. It said that if their poll numbers improve, they could still be invited to the second or third scheduled debates in October. Both are “constitutionally eligible”, Politico reported, and they’re on the ballot in enough states to make it possible to secure an Electoral College majority.
“Even though 76% of United States voters want four candidates in the debates, the two establishment parties are using their self-created commission to keep other candidates out”, the announcement goes on to read.
That question is created to not have people answer “I don’t know yet”, and it punishes any new candidate if their party does not have an established base of voters who always vote the party ticket.
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Though Johnson and Stein will likely mourn the opportunity to be in the first debate, it’s not too late to earn debate participation down the line. Green Party candidate Jill Stein generated 1.8 million interactions. “Yet the phony Commission on Presidential Debates is trying to rob voters of the open debates they want”, she wrote. What we do endorse is the chance for voters to make an informed choice from a wider pool of candidates than we’ve been offered, especially when the leading two candidates leave so little to be desired.
