The 2024 presidential election is finally picking up, as the Republican Party holds its first presidential debate, hosted by Fox News, on Wednesday.
As of Monday — the deadline to qualify — as many as 11 of the 14 declared candidates vying for the party’s nomination appear to have met the standards to participate, though the Republican National Committee has only confirmed eight of them, including the party’s frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, who has reportedly decided not to attend. A ninth qualifier, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, looks likely to make the stage after the RNC reviews his donor list and polls.
The seven currently confirmed participants — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — will have their first major opportunity to claw away support from Trump, who leads the field with the support of just over half of Republican voters, according to polling averages.
The contenders will meet at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a two-hour debate, starting at 8 pm local time. Fox News will air it on their cable TV channel and livestream it online and on their streaming platform Fox Nation. Longtime Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will moderate.
To make the debate stage, candidates faced two major hurdles: accumulating donations from a total of 40,000 unique donors, with at least 200 of those donations coming from unique individuals in 20 states or territories, and receiving the support from at least 1 percent of voters in three national polls, or 1 percent of voters in both two national polls and two early state polls, like Iowa or New Hampshire. The point of those requirements was to cull the field of contenders to those who seemed like they could actually be serious candidates for the nomination — even as…
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