Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced that she will not be attending the Democratic presidential primary debate in December.
Gabbard, the 38-year-old congresswoman from Hawaii, said in a Monday tweet that she will not appear onstage alongside the other presidential contenders and will instead focus her efforts on meeting with voters from early voting states.
“For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th ‘debate’ — regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina,” she said.
For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th “debate” — regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina.
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) December 10, 2019
During the last debate, which took place in November, she and former candidate Sen. Kamala Harris of California got into a spat about Gabbard’s political beliefs.
“I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on this stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who during the Obama administration spent four years full-time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” Harris said of Gabbard during one of the most heated moments of the November debate.
“What Sen. Harris is doing is, unfortunately, continuing to traffic in lies and smears and innuendos because she cannot challenge the substance of the argument that I’m making,” Gabbard responded, “which only makes me guess that she will, as president, continue the status quo, continue the Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy of regime change wars, which is deeply destructive.”
During the same debate, Gabbard also criticized Hillary Clinton for her comments implying Gabbard was a “Russian asset.”
“That our Democratic Party, unfortunately, is not the party that is of, by, and for the people. It is a party that has been and continues to be influenced by the foreign policy establishment in Washington represented by Hillary Clinton and others’ foreign policy, by the military-industrial complex, and other greedy corporate interests,” Gabbard said.
The congresswoman previously threatened to boycott the party’s October debate to bring attention to a process she called undemocratic but later agreed to participate in it.
