The Green Party candidate for President, Jill Stein was in Baltimore Friday night for a Get Out the Vote Rally.
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No third-party candidate has enough support to merit inclusion in the first U.S. presidential debate, leaving Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump a clear field to vie for support, organizers said Friday.
Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, qualified to participate in the the October 4 vice-presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, the commission announced on its website.
Both have railed against the commission’s criteria, saying that it unfairly limited voters’ options in an election cycle where the two major-party nominees are both historically disliked.
It also said that the vice presidential running mates of the two leading candidates were the only two to qualify for the vice presidential debate set for October 4. Johnson had 8.4% support in the average of the most credible polls, while Stein had 3.2%. Senator Bernie Sanders said that the threshold is “probably too high”, but didn’t specify by how far he believes it should be lowered.
But a battery of recent polls show that young voters, particularly Bernie or Bust-ers and #NeverTrump-ers in the Midwest, are fond of the former governor of New Mexico.
Johnson has publicly said that being excluded from the debates would doom his campaign.
The Commission on Presidential Debates is not an honest broker, and it doesn’t serve the public interest. “It should be noted that, when [Ross] Perot was allowed on the stage, polls showed his support to be in single digits, below where Johnson and Weld are now polling” he said.
“The CPD may scoff at a ticket that enjoys “only” 9 or 10% in their hand-selected polls, but even 9% represents 13 million voters, more than the total population of OH and most other states”, Johnson said in a statement.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton campaigning in West Virginia.
The exclusion was announced Friday afternoon by the privately run Commission on Presidential Debates, whose board includes many established Democratic and GOP players.
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Johnson immediately accused the CPD of attempting to “silence the candidate preferred by … millions of Americans”.
