Republican presidential hopeful Gary Johnson has sharply denounced CNN for excluding him from next Monday’s presidential debate in New Hampshire.

Johnson, who participated in the televised debate in South Carolina on May 5 — the first Republican presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle — is being excluded from Monday’s debate because he failed to garner an average of 2 percent in national polls, or a similar percentage in state-specific polling conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

Ironically, Johnson’s name wasn’t even included in some of the national polls used in the debate criteria.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, the libertarian-leaning former New Mexico governor said that his exclusion was “really disheartening” and “really disappointing.”

“I never contemplated being excluded from the debate table,” he said.

On Tuesday, Ron Nielson, a senior adviser to the Johnson campaign, fired off a blistering letter to CNN, telling the cable news network and the other debate sponsors that “the idea that inclusion – or exclusion – from a critical debate in a critical state will be based entirely upon polling arithmetic, seven months before a single vote is cast, is not only absurd, but counter-intuitive to the very purpose of a debate.”

Nielson reminded CNN that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom were also governors of relatively small states, were only polling at one or two percent at this stage in their respective 1976 and 1992 presidential campaigns.

“Given that poll rankings at this point are largely the result of decisions by the elite media, such as CNN, about who and what to cover – and to whom to give precious air time, it is more than a little ironic when those same media use those poll numbers to deem certain candidates deserving and others not,” wrote Nielson. “That irony is not lost on Republican primary voters who most assuredly do not want media elites pre-selecting their candidates for them.”

Johnson, the only participant in the May 5 South Carolina debate who will be excluded from Monday’s debate in the Granite State, also addressed the issue during an appearance on Fox & Friends on Monday morning. “Well, I didn’t crawl out from under a rock to run for president of the United States,” said Johnson, reminding his television audience that he had been a highly successful entrepreneur and a two-term governor of New Mexico.