Larry Elder Outraged After Finding Out He Didn't Qualify for GOP Debate

Conservative radio host and longshot presidential hopeful Larry Elder thought he would be among the candidates at the Republican National Committee's (RNC) first debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.

Now, he's threatening to sue the RNC for keeping him off the stage.

Elder admitted in a Fox News interview on August 18 that he was still 2,000 unique donors shy of the debate's 40,000 minimum to qualify—a threshold he insisted he had met as of August 21. Elder had also reportedly not met the RNC's polling requirement of at least 1 percent in three qualifying state and national polls. According to his Fox News interview, he had two as of August 18.

As of August 21, Elder insisted to his allies that he had qualified, including earning the third poll he needed to make the cut. But when news broke the following day that Elder would not be onstage after all, he was furious, calling the process "rigged" and threatening lawsuits after RNC leadership refused to recognize a poll by formerly Trump-aligned pollster Rasmussen showing Elder at 1 percent.

"I said from the beginning that it appeared the rules of the game were rigged, little did we know just how rigged it is," Elder said in a release. "For some reason, the establishment leaders at the RNC are afraid of having my voice on the debate stage. Just as I had to fight to successfully be on the ballot in the California recall election, I will fight to be on that debate stage because I fully met all of the requirements to do so."

But Elder was not alone.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez—who was so confident in his ability to qualify that he claimed in a nationally televised interview to have already purchased plane tickets for Milwaukee and releasing an official campaign graphic last week reading "SEE YOU IN MILWAUKEE" in bold lettering—also failed to qualify after reportedly not meeting the donor threshold.

Others, like former Texas Representative Will Hurd and Michigan businessman Perry Johnson, also failed to make the cut, while businessman Ryan Binkley failed to qualify despite reportedly achieving the RNC donor requirement.

But one could argue they had a case to make.

Unlike the Democratic National Committee's clear-cut rules to qualify for its debates in 2020, the RNC's requirements were more obscure, with unclear rules about what pollsters it considered credible or how it verified donors.

That led to some quirks in the process. Johnson and Hurd had arguably qualified for the debate on both counts. However, one of the three polls showing Hurd polling at 1 percent—a Des Moines Register poll published on August 21—had too small a sample size to be considered credible under the RNC standard. Johnson, meanwhile, was deemed ineligible after the RNC reportedly contested the legitimacy of a Victory Insights poll his campaign submitted.

"The debate process has been corrupted, plain and simple," Johnson said in a news release. "Our campaign hit every metric put forward by the RNC and we have qualified for the debate. We'll be in Milwaukee Wednesday and will have more to say tomorrow."

Suarez, meanwhile, has relied on a skewed reading of polling data to make his case. Despite polling at or near zero percent in nearly every national poll in August for a RealClearPolitics average of 0.3 percent, he earned 1 percent in a Cygnal poll some have claimed was biased in favor of Vivek Ramaswamy, and he allegedly rounded himself up to 1 percent in a survey by the Morning Consult earlier in the month.

The RNC's stringent polling requirement may have been a necessity after a proliferation of so-called "junk polls" in the 2022 midterms gave Republicans a skewed and overly optimistic perspective of their prospects.

Democrats' loose criteria to qualify for the debate field during the 2020 election cycle also led to tightly packed and chaotic, two-night debate in the summer of 2019 that Republicans likely wanted to avoid repeating. But other aspects of the qualifying process have been criticized by some—including Elder in a July 12 op-ed in The Hill—as unfairly rigged against lesser-known candidates, and easy to game.

Some—like Suarez and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum offered prizes and $20 gift cards to voters who contributed as little as $1 to their campaign, helping them surge from relative obscurity to contenders. But Elder—despite leading an unsuccessful recall effort against California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021—was left in the cold.

"Given the current rules in place, and with [former President Donald] Trump unlikely to appear at the first debates, Republicans may very well not have a single America-first, pro-MAGA candidate on the stage, leaving the vast majority of GOP primary voters unrepresented," he wrote in the July op-ed. "Without someone like me, the debate would be filled with anti-Trump politicians taking shot after shot at the MAGA movement, with no one to defend it.

"Let's place no artificial and arbitrary limits on the Republican Party, or the conservative ideas that can help the American people," he added. "Come the 23rd of August, Republicans need more debate, not less."

Newsweek reached out to the RNC via email for comment.