Qualifies

Klobuchar qualifies for November debate

By ZACH MONTELLARO

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) became the ninth candidate to qualify for the fifth Democratic presidential primary debate in November.

Klobuchar qualified after getting 3 percent support in a national poll conducted by Quinnipaic University that was released Thursday morning. She has previously hit 3 percent in three other polls approved by the Democratic National committee, according to POLITICO's tracking, and her campaign has said publicly that she has hit the 165,000 donor threshold.

The debate will be held on Nov. 20 in the Atlanta area and is sponsored by MSNBC and The Washington Post. On Wednesday, the hosts jointly announced that four women — NBC News' Andrea Mitchell and Kristen Welker, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and The Washington Post's Ashley Parker — will moderate the debate.

Klobuchar joins eight other candidates who have already qualified for the debate: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang.

In the Quinnipiac University poll, Warren held a lead over Biden, 28 percent to 21 percent. Sanders and Buttigieg were the only other candidates to crack double-digits, at 15 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

The poll is a split from a CNN/SRSS national poll released on Wednesday. In that poll, Biden held a fairly comfortable lead over Warren and Sanders, with the former vice president leading the pack at 34 percent, to Warren's 19 percent and Sanders' 16 percent.

The qualification deadline for the fifth debate is Nov. 13, a week before the debate night. Details like the venue and format of the debate are yet to be announced.

So far, nine of the 12 candidates who participated in the most recent Democratic primary debate earlier this month have qualified for the November debate, despite the DNC modestly increasing the threshold to qualify month-over-month. The new thresholds were not expected to drastically cull the number of candidates on stage from the twelve who participated in October, the largest major-party presidential primary debate ever.

The three candidates on the October debate stage who have yet to qualify for November are former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro. They need to hit three percent in two, three and four more polls, respectively.

The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from Oct. 17-21 and surveyed 713 Democratic voters and independent voters who lean Democratic. It has a margin of error of +/- 4.6 percentage points.