Unbelievably (or maybe believably, if you’ve been following this closely), there is a discrepancy on how to calculate the 2 percent cutoff that the DNC will not address publicly.
The “top-tier” candidates polling at or above 2 percent, using their three best polls:
Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro,
Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke,
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (all of whom crossed both the donor and polling threshold). If you use an average of all qualifying polls, as FiveThirtyEight did in their calculation, Casto falls into the lower-tier group.
The rest of the qualifiers, polling below that mark:
Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang (who crossed both thresholds).
Additionally: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio,
John Delaney, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell (who only crossed the polling threshold).
So who is left out? Steve Bullock, Mike Gravel, Wayne Messam and Seth Moulton. There was a chance for an 11th-hour qualification for Bullock on Wednesday, but he didn’t break 1 percent in a Monmouth University poll in Nevada (more on that poll below). However, Bullock is demanding entry into the debate. His campaign sent a letter to DNC chief Tom Perez insisting he has crossed the polling threshold (this all hinges on the ruling surrounding an open-ended ABC News/Washington Post poll), I reported.
But the debate qualification tracking continues on: The July debates have the same qualification rules as the June debates, meaning candidates like Bullock still have a shot at making it to Detroit next month. And don’t forget about the stepped-up rules for the fall debates, either. Bullock’s team alluded to those in the video, and I’ve already seen social media ads for a few candidates explicitly driving to the increased 130,000 donor threshold.
what will it take for some republican Nat Com member or other leader to declare that Harris is not a natural born citizen?