FORMER ALASKA SENATOR SAYS BLOOMBERG BUYS WAY IN
Former presidential candidate Mike Gravel says the Democratic National Committee emphatically told him that they could not change the rules for any one candidate when they disqualified him from a debate last year.
Six months later, the party changed the rules for billionaire Michael Bloomberg so he can take part in the upcoming Democratic debate.
In July of 2019, the Gravel campaign contacted the DNC after receiving over 65,000 unique donors, which was a threshold needed to be on the debate stage.
Gravel, a former Alaska U.S. Senator, was making his second run for president in 2019, and although he had enough unique donors, he was disqualified from the debates for not having high enough poll ratings.
 Back then, the DNC required candidates to poll at 1 percent or above in three DNC-approved polls.
But those polls were excluding Gravel’s name, the candidate pointed out. Gravel is a far-left Democrat and considered an outsider. He said he never thought he could win, but wanted to steer the debates to issues that matter to him; he is strongly anti-war.
[Read: Gravel meets donor threshold for Democratic debates]
“On the call, a senior official swore that they would never change the debate rules for any candidate. Six months later, they did exactly that,” the Gravel team wrote.
“We wanted to give everybody as many chances as we could,” says the senior DNC official, who is not named on the tape. “And I think that it’s a very generous set of rules. But I think the broader issue is we can’t change them later on for the benefit of any candidate. That’s kind of our rule No. 1 for us here, and it doesn’t matter who it is. We didn’t change them for Governor Bullock, and we can’t change them for anybody.”
The Democrats in January changed the rules to allow former New York former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to take part in the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. The DNC eliminated its individual donor threshold for Bloomberg, who is a self-funded candidate.
Democrats like Michael Moore pointed out that the DNC didn’t change the rules for minority candidates like Julian Castro or Cory Booker, but was responding to the millions of dollars Bloomberg could bring to the defeat of President Donald Trump. And top DNC party officials are deeply worried that Sen. Bernie Sanders is gaining traction across the polls. They dread having the avowed Socialist at the top of their ticket, and Joe Biden is looking more damaged by the day with the fallout from the impeachment of the president and the scandal involving Biden’s son’s associations in Ukraine.
A nationwide Hill-HarrisX poll showed Bloomberg surging past Sen. Elizabeth Warren to 3rd place, which has to be a disappointment for the Warren campaign, which has invested heavily in a ground game in Iowa for months. The two had been even in third place in December.
- Biden 29%
- Sanders 17% (-2)
- Bloomberg 11% (+4)
- Warren 9% (-2)
- Buttigieg 5%
- Yang 4%
- Steyer 4%
- Klobuchar 2%
- Gabbard 2%
- Bennet 2%
- Delaney 1%
- Patrick 1%G
