If you're already feeling completely exhausted about the 2020 presidential election, we've got some bad news.
The Democratic National Committee on Thursday unveiled details about its 2020 presidential primary debate schedule: The organization is going to hold a total of 12 debates, with six coming in 2019 and six more in 2020, reports CNN.
The first will be in June 2019, meaning the DNC is getting started two months earlier than the RNC did in 2015. More debates will follow in July, September, October, November, and December. Then, you'll get what will presumably be a much-needed four month reprieve before the debating resumes in April 2020. For comparison, as Bloomberg's Jennifer Epstein points out, Democrats only scheduled four debates in 2016, though they added five more later.
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Democrats are likely going to face a similar problem that Republicans did in 2016: far too many candidates to squeeze into one debate, at least early on. Republicans handled that by splitting some of their debates into two, with the low polling-candidates going first and the high-polling candidates making it into what was widely seen as the "real" event directly after. Democrats say they'll also split their early debates into two if need be, although in their case, the candidate placement would be randomly decided, according to DNC Chairman Tom Perez. The criteria to qualify for the debates hasn't been revealed, but the DNC says it won't just be polling and will take into account other factors like fundraising.
If the debates are split up, they'll also likely take place on two separate nights, meaning there would, in practice, actually be even more than 12 debates. Prepare yourself, because it's all just six months away.
