Long-shot GOP presidential candidate says he has acquired enough donors for RNC debate stage

Perry Johnson, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate, announced that he has reached the 40,000 donor threshold required by the Republican National Committee to attend the primary debates.

If confirmed, the entrepreneur will have reached the threshold ahead of other, more popular, Republican candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. While Perry didn’t immediately say how he went about fundraising, it likely came in large part due to his novel strategy of selling $1 T-shirts in order to acquire a substantive number of individual donors.

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“We reached a critical campaign milestone. Today, in New Hampshire, I announced we reached the 40,000 donors needed to make the RNC debate stage,” he announced in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We did it thanks to our generous donors. Thank you!”

However, some expressed skepticism about the claim.

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“WinRed has a list of top pages, and Perry Johnson is well below Suarez and Pence (neither of whom has reached 40K donors),” journalist John Hasson said. “It would appear that he’s either inflating his numbers or he received a LARGE number of donations not using WinRed.”

Despite reaching the donor threshold, Johnson has not yet reached the other debate qualifier of hitting 1% on a national poll, so he may still not qualify for the first debate.