CNN announced Tuesday that Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former United States ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, and former president Donald Trump have qualified for the network’s Republican presidential primary debate, to be held in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 10.
Both DeSantis and Haley have said they will appear onstage at the debate — which will take place five days before the Iowa Caucus — while Trump, who has avoided each debate thus far, will participate in a Fox News town hall in Iowa that night.
Notably, three candidates still in the race have not met CNN’s participation threshold, requiring candidates to receive at least 10 percent in three different national or Iowa statewide polls. One of those three must be, according to the network, an approved CNN poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy — who both appeared at the December 6 NewsNation debate held at the University of Alabama — and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson will be left off the stage on January 10.
DeSantis, over the past month, has escalated his attacks against Trump over the former president’s refusal to debate, calling on Trump — who leads every poll both in Iowa and nationwide — to “get out of [his] dungeon, get off the keyboard, stand on the debate stage” in December.
The RealClearPolitics polling average, taken over the period stretching from December 1 to December 19, has Trump in the lead in Iowa at 51.3 percent of the vote, while DeSantis sits at 18.6 percent and Haley at 16.1 percent. In a distant fourth place with 5.9 percent on average, Ramaswamy went after CNN in a post on X Saturday over his exclusion from the debate.
“CNN notified our campaign . . . that multiple qualifying polls that the RNC used for its debates wouldn’t count for CNN’s fake ‘debate’ that they’re hosting in Iowa on January 10,” he wrote. “The dishonesty needs to end.”