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Tulsi Gabbard, last female in Democratic race, booted from next debate

Maybe it’s the Democratic Party that’s the misogynist one.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — the last remaining woman in the Democrats’ presidential race — has been shut out of the party’s next debate with a rule change that makes it mathematically impossible for her to claim a podium.

“To keep me off the stage, the DNC again arbitrarily changed the debate qualifications,” Gabbard tweeted late Friday. “Previously they changed the qualifications in the OPPOSITE direction so Bloomberg could debate.”

She implored the two front-runners, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, to intervene on her behalf.

Under the party’s most recent set of debate rules, any candidate who had won at least one delegate in the party’s first 25 nomination contests had the right to take the stage.





Gabbard, who gained two delegates in American Samoa’s caucuses on Super Tuesday, would have qualified.

But on Friday, party poobahs announced new criteria requiring candidates to hold at least 20% of all awarded delegates by the time of the next scheduled debate in Phoenix on March 15.

Even if Gabbard ran the table in the next round of contests on Tuesday, she could not meet that threshold, Business Insider calculated.

Former rival Andrew Yang tweeted rueful sympathies.

“Someone asked me what the qualifications for the next debate would be,” he posted. “I responded ‘whatever Tulsi has plus one.’”





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