The debate hall at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada in Oct. 2015, hours before the first Democratic Presidential Debate of the 2016 election season. This year, candidates must meet a fundraising or polling threshold in order to participate in debates. | Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images 2020 Elections DNC announces fundraising, polling thresholds for early debates

The Democratic National Committee will limit its first presidential debates this year to 20 candidates, dividing the field over two nights, if necessary, and requiring candidates to meet either a fundraising or polling threshold to participate, a DNC official said Thursday.

The first debate will be broadcast on NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo on consecutive weekday nights in June, the official said. The second debate will be broadcast by CNN on consecutive weekday nights in July. The DNC and those networks will use random selection to arrange the candidate lineups for each night.


The locations, dates and format of the debates have not yet been announced.

The debate details came as the DNC convened in Washington for its winter meeting Thursday. Democratic Party officials are desperate to avoid the spectacle of the 2016 Republican presidential debates, which divided a sprawling field of candidates into one prime-time and one “undercard” debate seen widely as a sideshow.

For its first two debates this year, the DNC said a candidate may qualify for the stage either by reaching 1 percent support in three separate polls — including national polls or early nominating state polls — or by meeting a grass-roots fundraising threshold.

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For the first debate, a candidate seeking to qualify through the fundraising method must receive donations from 65,000 people in at least 20 different states, the DNC official said.

The fundraising metric is a departure for the DNC, which had relied in previous election cycles on polling. But the DNC official said that because of the large size of the 2020 primary field, the DNC believed polling alone this year might not adequately reflect a candidate's strength.

If more than 20 candidates qualify for a debate, the field will be winnowed using a methodology that gives preference to candidates meeting both the polling and fundraising thresholds, followed by candidates with the highest polling average.

DNC officials had been holding early-stage talks with television networks about 2020 primary debates since last year, anticipating holding 12 debates over the course of the campaign cycle. The DNC official said qualification rules could change for later debates.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez had previously said the party would split up its large candidate field randomly, allowing the DNC to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment of any candidate. The DNC has said the first four early nominating states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — would not host debates until 2020.

“As Chair of the DNC, I am committed to running an open and transparent primary process,” Perez said in a prepared statement Thursday. “To that end, we’ve spent months working with media partners to provide this unprecedented opportunity for candidates and voters to get to know each other. Because campaigns are won on the strength of their grassroots, we also updated the threshold, giving all types of candidates the opportunity to reach the debate stage and giving small-dollar donors a bigger voice in the primary than ever before.”