Tom Steyer Qualifies for October Debates, Bringing Field to 11

Tom Steyer, the billionaire and former hedge fund investor turned impeachment activist, became the 11th Democratic presidential candidate to qualify for the October debates on Sunday after a new poll showed him with 2 percent support in Nevada.

To make the cut, candidates must procure donations from 130,000 people and earn 2 percent support in four qualifying polls. Mr. Steyer fell one poll short of qualifying for the third Democratic debate in Houston this week. But the Democratic National Committee’s rules allow polls to carry over and count toward qualification for the fourth set of debates.

With three qualifying polls already under his belt and the fourth published Sunday, Mr. Steyer has now secured a spot in the debates next month, scheduled for Oct. 15 and possibly Oct. 16, in a location to be announced in Ohio.

“We are thrilled that Tom will be able to share his vision — of how together we can fix our broken political system — with the American public,” his campaign manager, Heather Hargreaves, said in a statement on Sunday.

[Who’s in? Who’s out? Keep up with the 2020 field with our candidate tracker.]

Only 10 candidates earned enough support to appear in this week’s debate, and they will all appear on a single stage on Thursday night. But with 11 candidates now qualified for the October event, the D.N.C. may split that debate across two nights, as it did for the first two sets of debates in June and July. The committee has not yet indicated whether it will do so.

Mr. Steyer opened his campaign two months ago and has since spent millions of dollars on internet and television ads that have helped him attract donors and make a dent in the polls relatively quickly, though some of his rivals have accused him of buying his way into the race.

The new poll that propelled Mr. Steyer into the October debate was one of several surveys of key early voting states released by CBS and YouGov on Sunday morning. The poll of 624 registered Democrats in Nevada had Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont narrowly in the lead there, with 29 percent support. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was next, with 27 percent, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had 18 percent. The poll was conducted Aug. 28-Sept. 4 and had a margin of error of about 5 percentage points.

In qualifying for the fourth set of debates, Mr. Steyer joins 10 other candidates who have already done so: Mr. Biden; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; Julián Castro, the former housing secretary; Senator Kamala Harris of California; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas; Mr. Sanders; Ms. Warren; and the entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

A New York Times analysis of donor and polling data shows that Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has met the donor threshold for qualification and is within two polls of meeting the polling criteria for the October debates. An ABC News/Washington Post national poll published Sunday showed Ms. Gabbard with 1 percent support among Democratic-leaning adults, short of the 2 percent needed.

The self-help author Marianne Williamson has also crossed the 130,000-donor threshold, but needs three more qualifying polls to earn a spot on the October debate stage. She received 0 percent support in the CBS/YouGov polls of early states, and less than half a percentage point of support in the ABC/Washington Post poll.

No other candidate in the 20-person field has reached the donor threshold or received 2 percent support in any qualifying polls. Candidates who have struggled to meet the D.N.C.’s debate criteria have been griping about it for months, and their complaints have intensified as the committee has tightened the requirements to qualify for debates.

At the D.N.C.’s summer meeting last month, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who is not particularly close to qualifying, blasted the committee’s process for winnowing the debate field.

“We’re rewarding celebrity candidates with millions of Twitter followers, billionaires who buy their way onto the debate stage and candidates who have been running for president for years,” he said. “These rules have created exactly the wrong outcomes and they will not help us beat Donald Trump.”

In recent weeks, as it became clear that they would not qualify for the debate this week, some candidates like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor, exited the race.

And last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said that it would be “tough to conceive” of continuing his campaign if he failed to qualify for the Democratic debate in October.

Candidates have until Oct. 1 to meet the donor and polling thresholds to qualify for the debate later in the month.