Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have been relegated to the preliminary debate next week, while Lindsey Graham and George Pataki will not be invited at all to the event, Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal announced Thursday.
The news organizations said that Tuesday’s prime time debate in Milwaukee will have only eight candidates who had high enough poll numbers: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich and Rand Paul.
As with three previous Republican events, there will be a preliminary debate of the lower polling candidates; this one will feature Christie, Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal.
Graham and Pataki — both of whom participated in preliminary debates in Ohio, California and Colorado — did not poll well enough to receive an invitation.
Right after the announcement, Christie tweeted: It doesn’t matter the stage, give me a podium and I’ll be there to talk about real issues …”
The Graham campaign sent out a statement saying it was disappointed with the decision, and calling the South Carolina senator the “foremost expert on foreign policy and national security” in the Republican field.
Fox Business Network said that it restricted the 9 p.m. ET prime debate to candidates that averaged 2.5% or higher in the four most recent national polls.
Only eight candidates met that standard: Trump (25.3%), Carson (24.5%), Rubio (11.8%), Cruz (10.0%), Bush (5.5%), Fiorina (3.0%), Kasich (2.8%) and Paul (2.5%).
The hour-long preliminary debate, scheduled for 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday, features candidates who received a minimum 1% support as determined by at least one of the four most recent national polls, Fox said.
The Milwaukee Republican encounter comes two weeks after a contentious clash in Boulder, Colo. Some of the Republicans protested some of the questions as biased, and kept interrupting each other throughout the proceedings.
The debates will also be live streamed on Foxbusiness.com.
In a statement earlier Thursday, Pataki spokeswoman Alicia Preston criticized the use of national polls to determine debate line-ups, and said that “national news networks are doing the job that has always been left to the people in individual states like New Hampshire.”
Pataki himself tweeted:
“Running for the most important leadership position in the world shouldn’t be reduced to the level of American Idol or Survivor.”
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