Will O’Malley not make the cut for next Democratic debate?

DAVENPORT - Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O'Malley, who might be in danger of failing to qualify for the next televised presidential debate, said Friday it's not fair to limit the campaign to two candidates.

'Our presidential process should not be managed like the TV show, ‘The Apprentice,' ” O'Malley said in an interview with the Quad-City Times editorial board. 'There are three people running in our party. Is that so unwieldy to manage?”

O'Malley said nobody had voted yet, and there already are few debates.

'The feedback I've gotten from people, most people feel like they would like to hear from us - all three of us,” he said.

NBC announced criteria Friday for the Jan. 17 debate in South Carolina, saying a candidate must reach an average of 5 percent either in recent national polls or in polls in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina.

O'Malley appears to have met that mark in Iowa, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, but not in South Carolina, New Hampshire or nationally.

The former governor of Maryland has been running a distant third behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The Clinton and Sanders campaigns said Friday they would like to see O'Malley included, and top party officials indicated Friday that they expect to see three candidates at the debate.

O'Malley has been complaining for some time about the limited number of debates.

'Just in the course of this campaign, we have seen one of the more undemocratic Democratic primaries in recent history,” he said Friday.

The former governor was in the Quad Cities for an afternoon event in Davenport. And he said he still had high hopes for the Feb. 1 caucuses, invoking the names of Jimmy Carter and John Kerry, candidates who did better than expected in past caucuses.

And, he added, 'clearly a part of any successful challenging candidates' strategy is to reshape the race in Iowa, and that's what I intend to do.”