On Wednes­day night, the dead­line to qual­i­fy for the first Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial debate in Mia­mi arrived. Can­di­dates had until mid­night to qual­i­fy by either reach­ing one per­cent sup­port in three Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty-approved polls or secur­ing 65,000 unique donors to con­tribute to their campaign.

By late morn­ing on Thurs­day, twen­ty Democ­rats had qual­i­fied under these rules (four­teen have reached both the polling and donor tar­gets) set by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, DNC Chair Tom Perez had already set a firm numer­i­cal lim­it of twen­ty can­di­dates for the first debate.

The qual­i­fy­ing twen­ty will not all par­tic­i­pate in the same debate – there are so many can­di­dates that the DNC has decid­ed to split the event over two nights (June 26th and 27th), with ten par­tic­i­pants each night. The DNC has not yet revealed which can­di­dates will appear on which night, although they have a com­plex sys­tem to ensure that high polling can­di­dates will appear on each night.

Can­di­dates who have qual­i­fied will now be brush­ing up on their debate skills and thor­ough­ly research­ing their rivals’ plat­forms to com­pare with their own.

Four Democ­rats run­ning for the pres­i­den­cy have not qual­i­fied for the first round of debates, a fact that will like­ly dev­as­tate their cam­paigns. May­or Wayne Mes­sam, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Seth Moul­ton and octo­ge­nar­i­an Mike Grav­el of Alas­ka have fall­en way short of qual­i­fy­ing, not reach­ing 1% in a sin­gle poll between them.

Mon­tana Gov­er­nor Steve Bul­lock has been infu­ri­at­ed by his exclu­sion from the debate stage. Bul­lock had been con­fi­dent in the fact that he was polling at 1% in three polls when the DNC sud­den­ly dis­qual­i­fied one of the polls (con­duct­ed by ABC News/Washington Post) on the basis that the poll did not pro­vide a full list of can­di­dates to the par­tic­i­pants. Bullock’s team spent Wednes­day denounc­ing the DNC’s posi­tion and writ­ing to Tom Perez to angri­ly com­plain about the situation.

Mon­tana Gov­er­nor Steve Bul­lock speaks at an event in Yel­low­stone (Pho­to: YPF/Matt Ludin)

The cam­paign also released a video of one of Bullock’s con­stituents – Mon­tana res­i­dent Madi­son John­son– who claimed, “You won’t see Gov­er­nor Steve Bul­lock at the first debate, and I’m the rea­son why.”

Accord­ing to the video, while oth­er can­di­dates were focus­ing on get­ting their cam­paigns rolling, the Gov­er­nor was far too busy bat­tling state Repub­li­cans in Mon­tana over health­care. Hence, his cam­paign was at a disadvantage.

Bullock’s cam­paign failed to explain why the numer­ous oth­er cur­rent­ly-serv­ing elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives – includ­ing a gov­er­nor, sen­a­tors, mem­bers of Con­gress and may­ors – were able to per­form their duties and set up a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign at the same time, while Bul­lock was unable to.

Even if Bullock’s argu­ments win over a lot of peo­ple, he is still faced with the prob­lem of being the twen­ty-first can­di­date to qual­i­fy, when the lim­it has already been firm­ly set at twen­ty. That fact is like­ly to mean that the DNC will find it much eas­i­er to push his com­plaints aside and focus on the already huge num­ber of can­di­dates who def­i­nite­ly did qualify.

The first round of Demo­c­ra­t­ic debates will take place on the June 26th and 27th in Mia­mi. They will be streamed online for free on NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News App, and Telemundo’s dig­i­tal platforms.