Yang Qualifies for Next Debate, Joining 6 Others

A national Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday showed Yang at 4%. He needed to reach or exceed that mark in four polls to qualify for the debate, and this was his fourth. He had long since met the Democratic National Committee’s other qualification requirement of 200,000 unique donors.

Yang will join, in alphabetical order, former Vice President Joe Biden; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana; Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont; investor Tom Steyer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on the debate stage Dec. 19. The debate will take place at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California had also qualified for the debate but ended her campaign last week. She had been the only candidate of color in the lineup. Now that distinction falls to Yang, who is Asian American.

“I am proud to be the only person of color who’s going to be on that stage,” Yang told supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday.

Other candidates still have two days to qualify — the deadline is 11:59 p.m. Thursday — but the lineup is unlikely to change. The only candidate within striking distance, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, has three qualifying polls and the requisite 200,000 donors, but she said Monday that she would not participate in the debate even if she made the cut.

“I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Gabbard tweeted. She has clashed with the Democratic Party’s leadership and criticized the debate qualification criteria, and previously raised the possibility of boycotting a debate in October before deciding to participate.

Nobody else is close to qualifying. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro have met the donor threshold but have no qualifying polls. They each had 1% support in the Quinnipiac poll. In a national Monmouth University poll released earlier Tuesday, Booker had 2% support, and Castro had 1%.

In terms of the overall contours of the race, the polls showed little change. Biden retained a clear lead, with Sanders in second place, Warren in third and Buttigieg in fourth. (In the Quinnipiac poll, the difference between Sanders and Warren was within the margin of error.)

Notably, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who entered the race less than three weeks ago, had 5% support in both polls. Bloomberg has already spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on advertising and has not been seeking donors, a decision that will exclude him from debates regardless of his poll numbers unless the DNC drops its donor requirement.

Also working against Bloomberg: Voters who know of him tend not to like him. In both polls released Tuesday, he had the worst favorability to unfavorability ratio of any Democratic candidate for whom that question was asked.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .