Doesn’t the GOP also have criteria, about candidates having a certain minimal amount of support in national polls? Certainly DeSantis easily qualifies based on polling, if they indeed used polling support as a criterion.
“Doesn’t the GOP also have criteria, about candidates having a certain minimal amount of support in national polls? Certainly DeSantis easily qualifies based on polling, if they indeed used polling support as a criterion.”
Yes, there is a polling criterion. No, DeSantis hasn’t met it yet – nor has anyone else.
The problem arises from the way the RNC set the polling standard. The only polls that count are those that include at least 800 likely Republican voters. National polls usually sample more PEOPLE than that but they draw respondents from the entire electorate, so they might fall short of 800 likely Republican voters.
So far there’s been only one poll that met the standard (see https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/12/anti-trump-presidential-candidates-poll-debates-00106000 for details). From that article:
“The poll showed eight candidates hitting another RNC debate criteria: that they garner at least 1 percent support. Those were Trump (56 percent), Ron DeSantis (17 percent), Vivek Ramaswamy (8 percent), Mike Pence (7 percent), Nikki Haley (3 percent), Tim Scott (3 percent), Chris Christie (3 percent) and Asa Hutchinson (1 percent).”
I assume DeSantis will qualify. The candidates who are on the bubble, though, might have a problem, because they’ll have very few chances to hit the qualifying minimum. Most of the polls that get widely reported won’t count.
Yeah, they have to get at least 3% or something like that I think. It’s not too high of a bar for the polling.