Suarez, Elder, And Johnson Fail To Make Debate Stage

The New York Times reports:

The RNC had imposed a 9 p.m. deadline for candidates to accumulate at least 40,000 donors and hit 1 percent in a certain number of qualifying national and state polls. But two officials familiar with the R.N.C.’s decision said that three candidates all fell short: Perry Johnson, a businessman who previously tried to run for governor of Michigan; Francis X. Suarez, the mayor of Miami; and Larry Elder, a talk-show host who made a failed run for governor of California.

Those three campaigns, already all long-shots, had claimed to have met the donor and polling threshold. But they now face an even more uncertain future. Mr. Johnson, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, said the debate process “has been corrupted” and that his campaign hit all the metrics and qualified for the debate. “We’ll be in Milwaukee Wednesday and will have more to say tomorrow,” he added.

Read the full article. Also not appearing will be Will Hurd, who has refused to sign the RNC’s loyalty pledge. But it doesn’t appear that Hurd had qualified anyway.

Eight candidates were officially announced for the first debate of the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Wednesday in Milwaukee. But Donald Trump wasn’t among them.https://t.co/y2lVzSlXfN

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 22, 2023