Mike Gravel Didn’t Poll High Enough In Polls That He Wasn’t Even Included In, So He Can’t Debate With Dems

Former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel and his supporters celebrated on Twitter after hitting 65,000 unique donors. Not bad for someone who his candidacy announced on April 2. By the original qualifiers that everyone expected, he qualified. It’s just that 21 candidates in total qualified for the second round of debates taking place at the end of this month.

Qualifiers For The Democratic Debate

There were two qualifiers, and unless there ended up being more than 20 people that qualified, candidates could qualify in either of these ways:

1. Poll at 1-percent in at least three qualifying national polls or early-state polls in different areas of the country or by different pollsters.
2. Get 65,000 unique donors to donate to their campaign.

Since 21 Candidates Qualified, Mike’s Out

As it turned out, more than 20 presidential candidates did qualify, and with a maximum of 20 candidates allowed on the CNN debate stage at the end of July, someone had to go.

The Democrats favor poll results over unique donor numbers, even though pols engage as few as 400 people sometimes and have huge margins of error. Meanwhile, the former Alaskan senator didn’t do well in the polls that they chose and published.

Gravel only qualified by getting over 65K unique donors. This is clearly a more impressive accomplishment than as few as four hundred people answering chance phone calls and as few as four or so of them (depending on the poll) picking your name. But those are the rules, and the Democrats get to set them.

Gravel Was Left Out Of Multiple ‘Qualifying’ Polls

The best part? Mike Gravel wasn’t even included as a choice in many of the Democrats’ so-called qualifying polls. How’s that Democracy for ya?

• As you can see, the Fox News Poll left Gravel out of the choices. Four percent of respondents actually chose “None of the above,” but we’ll never know how many of those polled that chose the “None of the above” option had been waiting to hear Gravel’s name read off the list.
• The Hart Research poll used by NBC and The Wall Street Journal didn’t remember to include Gravel either.
• When you search the document for the CNN poll conducted by SSRS, you won’t find Gravel’s name anywhere on it either, though two percent opted for “someone else.” So, while CNN is qualified to host the debate, the polling organization CNN hired didn’t even include him in the options. SSRS managed to include John Kerry, Bloomberg and others not running for president in their polling options, but not Gravel who is actually running.