Fox News has set the rules for the 2016 presidential race by deciding who gets into the main debate and who doesn’t. And guess who didn’t make the cut at all?
Next Tuesday the Republican presidential candidates will once again face off in the latest GOP debate. Fox News has controlled the race since the 2016 season began, by determining the rules for which candidates get to appear on the main stage – the top tier candidates – and which are forced to “sit at the kiddie table,” so to speak.
For the next debate, hosted in Milwaukee by Fox News Business and the Wall Street Journal, Fox has decided that polling numbers for Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee aren’t strong enough, so they will join Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum in the early, second tier debate.
But the big news is that low polling numbers for George Pataki and Lindsey Graham will exclude them from either debate, effectively making their candidacies moot.
Christie and Huckabee didn’t make the 2.5% threshold to appear in the main debate, and Pataki and Graham didn’t even make the 1% threshold to participate at all.
All six of these candidates – Jindal, Santorum, Christie, Huckabee, Pataki, and Graham – are on the verge of being forced to drop out, but this debate, many say, is really “make or break” for Jeb Bush.
In order, for the main debate, the lineup will be: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and John Kasich. For the second tier debate, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum.
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Images via Fox News Business/Twitter
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