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The Republican National Committee confirmed late Monday night the presidential candidates who would face each other in Wednesday night’s debate.
They are: North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, former vice president Mike Pence, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina senator Tim Scott.
Former president Donald Trump, who leads every poll comfortably, will not be in attendance. Trump had hoped to send surrogates to vouch on his behalf in the spin room — which, in an apparent tribute to Watergate, will be in the players’ parking garage of the Fiserv Forum. But according to CNN’s Alayna Treene, debate host Fox News has informed the Trump campaign that spin room credentials would not be provided if Trump was not attending. The Trump surrogates — who include Congressman Byron Donalds, Congressman Matt Gaetz, former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump Jr. — are thought to be working on a resolution with the network. Instead of attending the first primary debate, Trump will partake in a pre-taped interview by ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson on X, formerly Twitter. Trump is skipping Milwaukee despite a CBS/YouGov poll which indicates that 73 percent of likely GOP voters want the former president to debate — though naturally you don’t have to like or support Trump to want to see him participate…
There are a small number of Republican candidates for president who last week claimed to have qualified for the Milwaukee debate, yet seem not to have made the RNC’s cut. They include businessman Perry Johnson (“We did it!, he tweeted Friday) and Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez. “The debate process has been corrupted, plain and simple,” Johnson wrote late last night. “Our campaign hit every metric put forward by the RNC and we have qualified for the debate. We’ll be in Milwaukee Wednesday and will have more to say tomorrow.” Suarez, meanwhile, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that candidates who failed to meet the qualification criteria should drop out — including him.
It’s not clear what, if any, steps Johnson and Suarez will take to contest the RNC’s choice of polls that count. Larry Elder, however, plans to sue the RNC over their use of polling parameters, which he alleges they changed in order to exclude him and others from the debate stage. “I said from the beginning that it appeared the rules of the game were rigged,” Elder said in a statement. “Little did we know just how rigged it is.” (Shouldn’t that be “they are…”?)
The Spectator will have extensive coverage of the Milwaukee debate over the coming days — including on-the-ground reporting from the spin room.
