Tom Steyer appears to qualify for October Democratic debate
Billionaire Tom Steyer appears to have qualified for the debate stage for the fourth Democratic presidential primary debate in October after reaching 2% in Nevada in the CBS News Battleground Tracker poll published Sunday. He previously received 2% in the July CBS News Iowa poll, as well as 2% in a Monmouth South Carolina poll and 3% in a Monmouth poll in Iowa.
His campaign had already announced it reached the 130,000 donor threshold in August.
Steyer's qualification means that there will be two nights of debate in October instead of one. Because only 10 of the candidates qualified in September, there will only be a single night of debate on Thursday. Having fewer candidates on stage each night in October will mean that the candidates will have more time to make their points.
The threshold to make the third and fourth debates is the same, so the 10 candidates who met the requirements for the third debate in Houston also qualify for the fourth.
For the third and fourth debates, candidates were required to both reach 2% in four polls and collect donations from 130,000 unique donors, which doubled the thresholds of the earlier debates. For the first two rounds, candidates needed to poll at 1% in three polls and acquire 65,000 donors.
ABC and Univision are hosting the third debate at Texas Southern University Thursday. The following candidates are those who qualified for both the third debate and the fourth debate.
- Joe Biden
- Cory Booker
- Pete Buttigieg
- Julián Castro
- Kamala Harris
- Amy Klobuchar
- Beto O'Rourke
- Bernie Sanders
- Elizabeth Warren
- Andrew Yang
Representative Tulsi Gabbard has met the donor threshold but not the polling threshold.
The second Democratic debate took place in Detroit in July.
Kathryn Watson and Grace Segers contributed to this report, which will be updated as other candidates qualify.