Tulsi Gabbard will skip the next Democratic debate even if she qualifies

SCREEN CAPTURE / ABC

Tulsi Gabbard criticizes the Democratic Party's criteria for the debates.

Even if Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI, gets the one more poll she needs to qualify for the December Democratic debate, she says she won't take part.

"For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th "debate" — regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls," Gabbard tweeted. "I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina."

She has been critical of the criteria put up by the Democratic National Committee that the candidates have to meet in order to participate in the series of debates. The debate on Dec. 19 will be the sixth time the qualifiers meet on stage.

So far, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and tech billionaire Tom Steyer have qualified for the next debate. The rest of the large field is left out in the cold.

“There’s been a lack of transparency in that whole process about which polls are selected, which aren’t, which they’re seeing as qualifying, which ones are actually polling,” Gabbard told Hill.TV as she struggled to meet the criteria in an earlier debate.

“Spending time with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, they don’t take kindly to seeing how a few people in Washington, D.C. at the DNC are trying to be the gatekeepers,” she said.

She wasn't the only candidate questioning the hurdles set by the Democrats.

Sen. Cory Booker rebuked the DNC for letting “elites” and “money” decide which candidates gain the opportunity to occupy the debate stage. 

"I'm a little upset with the (Democratic National Committee) right now because they seem to be trying to make the decisions for you," Booker told a Sunday crowd gathered in a Dubuque bar.

Booker also made note that the New Hampshire Democratic Party voted last weekend to send the DNC a letter urging the party to reconsider the qualifying criteria for the debate to ensure greater diversity and give voters "the greatest opportunity" to hear from the candidates.

The fact that the candidates who have qualified for the December debate are all white sharpened the flaws of the DNC's attempt to winnow down the crowd of candidates that at one point numbered 24.

Booker, who is one of two African Americans running for president, pointed out that there are now more billionaires among the candidates than there are African Americans, after Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, dropped out of the race.

Booker and Gabbard, who is Samoan American, and the other candidates of color, Julian Castro and Andrew Yang have also not met the DNC criteria. Yang needs one more poll where he has garners 4% to qualify.

DNC spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa told the Washington Times that the party’s debate requirements were “inclusive." 

She asserted that historically, candidates who have polled lower than 4% in the primary season have never been selected as the Democratic presidential nominee. “While we are legally required to have objective criteria for each debate, our qualifying criteria has stayed extremely low throughout this entire process,” she said in an emailed statement. “We’ve never seen a political party take this many steps to be inclusive.”

However, "historically," there have never been this many candidates running for president, which greatly dissipates potential supporters and donors among the diverse presidential hopefuls representing a wide political spectrum.

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