Rand Paul is refusing to participate in the undercard debate on Fox Business, and he may have good reason. The libertarian Republican candidate may be getting screwed by the network:
Rand Paul is making a last-minute push to get on the main stage at Thursday’s GOP primary debate after a new poll showed he would have qualified if the survey results were not held for two days before being released.
The Kentucky senator’s campaign says it has been in touch with Fox Business, the debate organizer, about the new poll “and expect to hear from them soon.”Paul has failed to catch fire like some of his other fellow GOP presidential candidates, but Fox Business Network’s decision to boot him for the first time off the main stage at Thursday night’s debate in South Carolina was a potential knockout punch for his flailing candidacy.
The network made that decision based on Paul’s standing in public polls. Fox Business had said last month that the top six candidates in the five most recent national polls as of Monday evening would make the main stage, joined by any other candidates who appeared in the top five in either Iowa or New Hampshire — the two states that vote first in the nominating process. Paul was in seventh place in all three averages, according to POLITICO’s calculations.
But a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll in Iowa released Wednesday morning has Paul at 5 percent — alone in fifth place. In fact, if the Des Moines Register poll is included on the list of the five most recent polls, it gets Paul into a tie for fifth place with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 4.2 percent. That, presumably, would get Paul onto the main stage.It’s true that the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll was released 36 hours after Fox Business’ deadline for inclusion. But it was conducted Jan. 7-10 — entirely before the qualification deadline. Other polls from American Research Group (Jan. 6-10) and Quinnipiac University (Jan. 5-10) conducted through Sunday were released on Monday afternoon (Jan. 11) and made it into Fox Business’ average.
Paul’s campaign has invested significant resources in Iowa, and has a solid groundgame. Not only that, but he leads both Bush AND Kasich in the early primary state. His exclusion seems to be another case of the establishment trying to do the best they can to control the narrative.
AAN Staff
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