Tonight, the six leading candidates for the vacating U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana will appear on stage for the final debate before next week’s election. Five of them are your usual assortment of state lawmakers, including the state treasurer, a public service commissioner and a couple of current Congressmen.
The sixth is David Duke, most famous for his role in the 1970s as Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He is currently polling at just over the five percent threshold imposed by the debate sponsors in an attempt to weed out the fringier candidates.
Duke’s candidacy has been built atop the same foundation of anti-Semitism and white supremacy that Donald Trump’s campaign has erected, and he’s ridden Trump’s cheap, imported coattails straight onto the debate stage at Dillard University in New Orleans.
The venue is posing a problem for Raycom Media, the sponsors of Wednesday night’s debate. Dillard University is a historically black university, incompatible with Duke’s platform of white supremacy. But rather than move the goalposts for qualification to the debate—which is well within their power, and a tactic used to great effect by the GOP itself during the presidential primaries—Raycom has instead bent over backwards to accommodate Duke by banning all students and journalists from attending the debate at all.
Instead, the six candidates will speak to a mostly empty auditorium (capacity: 400), a handful of television producers, and five hand-picked supporters of each candidate.
Vicki Zimmerman, the company’s regional news director, refused to say whether or not Duke’s presence on stage was the impetus for their decision to exclude the audience. “We just elected to have a closed production,” she stated.
Students were rightly enraged that they were being excluded from an event on their own campus because a white supremacist happens to be involved. A group called Socially Engaged Dillard University Students is planning a protest just outside the debate.
“I do plan on protesting,” freshman Kristen Kenner told the local NBC affiliate. “I don’t understand why they are providing a venue for someone who is associated with a past like that.”