1st Democratic presidential primary debate scheduled for June


The first 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate will air simultaneously on NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo in June, the Democratic National Committee announced Thursday.
The exact date and location have yet to be determined. The DNC wants to be able to include up to 20 candidates, and depending on the number of candidates eligible to appear onstage, the debate could be held over two nights. Should back-to-back debates take place, the DNC said in a statement, it will choose the lineups at random, in order to "provide each candidate with a fair opportunity to make his or her case to a large, national audience."
For candidates to be included in the debate, they have to have at least 1 percent support in three polls, or show they have received 65,000 individual donations from 200 unique donors in at least 20 states.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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