Texas Southern University will host the third Democratic primary debate, scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13.
The agreement between TSU and ABC News was announced on the network’s “This Week” show on Sunday morning.
“As the heart and soul of Houston, Texas Southern University is proud to serve as the venue for for such a prestigious event,” TSU President Austin A. Lane said in a statement. “Not only does this reflect positively on the university and the City of Houston, it also provides our students with opportunities to work directly with ABC and its partners to gain valuable experience throughout the process.”
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Tom Perez, Democratic National Committee chair, said Houston was an ideal debate site because of the city’s diversity and Democratic elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Mayor Sylvester Turner.
The two-part debate will be held at TSU’s Health & Physical Education arena, which has 7,200 seats, excluding the venue’s floor. The Student Recreation Center will serve was the media center throughout the week.
TSU spokesman Steve Scheffler said the school has yet to determine how many tickets will be available for its roughly 9,700 students.
“We obviously want our students to participate as much as possible throughout the event,” Scheffler said.
See here for the background. Honestly, if they gave a ticket to every student that wanted one, and only stopped when they either ran out of tickets or ran out of students, that would be fine by me. I’m not a debate-watching person, but I’m excited that our city will host this.
I was a graduate student in Government at UT when the Clinton/Obama show came to town in early 2008 (or late 2007?).
They only allotted something like 400 tickets to the 50000 students at UT for that one. Don’t recall if it was handled by lottery or what, but I didn’t get one.
Thankfully it appears TSU is not run by people with such lack of perspective.
They are going to give most of the tickets to Democrat Pct. Chairs and political workers I would imagine. They do all the heavy lifting so they should be rewarded in my opinion. Just to clarify the article a little bit. Mayor Turner went to U. of H.