Someone called Perry Johnson has announced his qualification for the donor threshold required for first Republican presidential primary debate later this month, ahead of candidates such as Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and even former Vice-President Mike Pence.
Johnson, who is actually a businessman who recruited the majority of his donors by selling “I stand with Tucker” t-shirts for $1, took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce his qualification, posting:
“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.”
Johnson has so far raised around $67,000 and has contributed over $328,000 of his own money towards his presidential campaign. Yet, he has not been able to make an impact in the polls, consistently bringing in less than one percent of the vote.
He previously tried to run in the 2022 Michigan gubernatorial race, but fell short after he failed to meet the necessary 15,000 signatory threshold to appear on the ballot. Officials at the Michigan elections bureau discarded a whopping 6,983 of Johnson’s signatures after it was suspected that they were “fraudulent” – an action that Johnson claims violated his rights. He was one of five GOP candidates removed from the race that year.
Johnson is one of eight candidates to pass the threshold for the RNC debate, including former President Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, and Doug Burgum. Mike Pence, however, is struggling to reach the threshold, admitting in a recent CNN interview, “We’re not there yet.” He claims to have amassed over 30,000 so far.
