Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face each other alone at this year’s first United States presidential debate, after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that third party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein had failed to qualify for the 26 September face-off.
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The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Johnson and Stein have both missed the cut to be included in the first debate, with neither reaching the 15% support threshold in an average of credible national polling. The polling averages showed Clinton with 43 percent, Trump with 40.4 percent, Johnson with 8.4 percent and Stein with 3.2 percent.
Stein has repeatedly promised to show up at the first presidential debate, scheduled for september 26 at New York’s Hofstra University, and to get arrested in an act of civil disobedience.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks during a news conference at South Austin neighborhood Thursday, Sept. 8, .
Johnson and Stein could still qualify for the second and third presidential debates – October 9 at Washington University in St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri, and October 19 at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in Las Vegas.
Johnson, the former two-term governor of New Mexico, met a room full of supporters who chanted “Gary, Gary” and held up signs that said: “Our Best America Yet”.
Hofstra – Long Island’s largest private university – will become the first school to host presidential debates in three consecutive presidential election cycles. The CPD said the 15% standard would be reapplied closer to those dates.
The debate will feature only Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
“I think we should have a debate with no moderator, just Hillary and I sitting there talking”, he said.
The only time a third candidate has been allowed on the stage was 1992, when both parties wanted him on the stage for their own purposes.
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Johnson is generally socially liberal – he favors legalized marijuana, same-sex marriage and says abortion rights must be respected. “Yet, the Republicans and Democrats are choosing to silence the candidate preferred by those millions of Americans”, he said in a statement. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge in August.
