MIAMI, FLORIDA — The third GOP debate will be held in Miami in November.
The event will take place in “early November,” according to CNN’s Kristen Holmes, who first reported the news. The Republican National Committee (RNC) has not yet announced the date, venue, moderators or the qualification rules for the third debate, according to Politico.
The first debate was held in Milwaukee on August 23 and the second is scheduled for September 27 at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
Former President Donald Trump skipped the first debate and has not announced his intention to participate in the second debate later this month, but declared he would “not be doing the debates.”
Trump’s famous Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach is just 75 miles north of Miami, but the proximity is unlikely to factor into his decision.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” he wrote in a Truth Social post about why he would be skipping the debates.
An internal poll released by the DeSantis campaign two weeks before the first debate showed that most early-state voters think Trump’s absence would make him look “weak.”
Eight candidates took the stage in Milwaukee last month: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
A Washington Post poll found that GOP voters believed DeSantis “won” the debate, with 36 percent of viewers selecting him as the top performing candidate.
Ramaswamy’s 26 percent earned him second place in the poll, while Haley’s 15 percent landed her in third.
“There’s a lot of people up there that said a lot of things,” DeSantis told Fox and Friends after the debate. “I’m the only one that’s actually delivered on all these issues – whether it’s [the] economy, whether it’s crime, the border – you name it.”
“Those are the issues that we were really strong on, the issues that people really care about,” the governor added. “I was more interested in talking directly to the people at home rather than some of the bickering that was back and forth.”
