I understand that asking the DNC to change the rules for qualifying for the Democratic debates is unprecedented. I'm not asking for much of a change - I think the current rules have been very fair to candidates. The field has slowly winnowed, and many, many different candidates have had their chance for a breakout moment.

So I'm not asking for a huge change. All I'm asking is that the DNC add one more way for candidates to be able to qualify for the debate: if they reach 400,000 individual donors, that should be enough. A candidate with 400,000 donors should qualify them as a serious, viable candidate.

Why do I think the rules need a bit of tweaking? Because there is also an unprecedented difficulty for candidates who would just now be breaking 5% to qualify for January: there are less than 3 weeks to qualify, and the next ~2 weeks will see few qualifying polls be released due to the holiday season.

A candidate should not be barred from participating in the debate because luck had it that only a fraction of the number of polls we usually see between the debates will be released.

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You probably already know that this change - if enacted - would affect Mr. Andrew Yang the most, since he is on the cusp of qualifying, but is just now starting to break 5% nationally and in early states. His voice would be lost due to the bad luck of simply not having that many polls released.

Mr. Yang's campaign recently said that they had passed 350,000 individual donors. So I am not asking for him to be automatically qualified; I am asking for his campaign to be given a reasonably difficult challenge to qualify for January. Receiving the 4 qualifying polls at 5% would be a perfectly reasonable challenge - if we knew that polls would be released on the same timetable as other months.

They won't be. In the two weeks before the November debate, two polls were released, compared with nine leading up to the October debate. If the candidates who are qualifying for these debates are qualified based upon their support from voters, that support is not at all well-represented by five or six polls.

Again, I am not just asking for Mr. Yang to be qualified automatically. The current donor threshold required in addition to qualifying polls (225,000 donors for January) is not, by itself, enough to qualify a candidate. However, I believe that having 400,000 donors would be a requirement on-par with receiving 5% in 4 polls, or 7% in 2 early-state polls.

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I hope the DNC will consider tweaking the rules to add this. Mr. Yang has turned from a complete political-unknown at the start of 2019 into one of the seven candidates to still be standing on the debate stage in December. That kind of unprecedented growth and grassroots support does not seem to be something that should be stifled because of bad luck.

Thank you for reading. I hope this petition finds you well.