Representative Tulsi Gabbard, one of 12 Democratic presidential candidates who have qualified for this week’s televised debate, said on Monday that she would participate in the forum after raising the possibility of boycotting it to protest what she sees as a “rigging” of the election.
Ms. Gabbard had argued that the corporate news media and Democratic National Committee were working together to rig the event. On Monday, she offered little explanation of why she had dropped her objection to participating. “I just want to let you know that I will be attending the debate,” she wrote in an email to supporters.
While Ms. Gabbard had met the qualifying criteria to participate in Tuesday’s debate, she is among the lower-polling candidates and has struggled to gain traction, never breaking 3 percent in any major poll. She failed to qualify for the September debate and has not yet made the stage for the November face-off. The New York Times is a co-sponsor of Tuesday’s debate with CNN.
Ms. Gabbard has disputed the polls selected by the national committee as “certifying” candidates for the debate, arguing that many of the noncertified surveys are more accurate. Those polls would also help Ms. Gabbard qualify for the November debate.
Her call won support from a fellow primary candidate, Marianne Williamson, who is also polling among the bottom tier of presidential hopefuls.
“I have great respect for Tulsi for saying such inconvenient truth,” Ms. Williamson posted on Twitter last week, after Ms. Gabbard first raised the idea of boycotting the debate.
Ms. Gabbard’s warnings of a rigged election are likely to resonate with her base, an unconventional mix of anti-interventionist progressives, libertarians, contrarian culture-war skeptics, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They like her isolationist foreign policy, her calling out of what she sees as censorship in the major technology platforms and her support for drug decriminalization.
Buoyed by frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, her quixotic, bare-bones campaign has also won praise from some surprising admirers, including Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist; former Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian star; and Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, who has said he finds her “refreshing.”
Ms. Gabbard has lobbed some of the toughest attacks on the debate stage. In July, she assailed Senator Kamala Harris over her record as a prosecutor, becoming the most searched candidate on Google in the hours after the event.
Ms. Harris later shot back, calling Ms. Gabbard an “apologist” for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, whom Ms. Gabbard controversially visited in Damascus in January 2017.
A telegenic military veteran, Ms. Gabbard, once a Democratic darling, began falling out of party favor during President Barack Obama’s administration, when she picked a series of high-profile fights over foreign policy, joining Republicans in demanding that Mr. Obama use the term “radical Islam.”
In 2016, she resigned her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. She has said that she believes that the primary was “rigged” by the party committee against Mr. Sanders.
This year’s qualifying criteria were designed by the national committee as a direct response to criticism leveled during the 2016 campaign by supporters of Mr. Sanders, who argued that the party committee organized the debate schedule to favor Mrs. Clinton, the eventual party nominee.
While some lower-polling candidates have expressed frustration with the qualification rules, particularly the requirement that candidates amass at least 165,000 unique donors to make the November debate stage, there has been little outcry from Democratic voters.
In June, nearly three out of four voters who planned to attend the Iowa caucuses said that at least several of the candidates should drop out of the race, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa poll.