On Thursday evening at 9 p.m. ET, seven of the top Republican primary candidates will appear in a Fox Business Network debate.
The event, hosted from North Charleston, S.C., will be available for viewers to live stream for free, without authentication, on FOXBusiness.com, according to a network press release.
Cable viewers can also watch the debate on TV. A handful of big satellite and cable TV companies, including DIRECTV, COX Communications, Suddenlink, and Mediacom will unbundle FOX Business Network to make the channel accessible to more people.
And for those who would rather be on Facebook than watch the debate at all, Fox is also partnering with the social media platform to bring live coverage of the debate to its own Facebook page, including interviews with the moderators and behind-the-scenes looks.
The prime-time debate will include Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich.
The undercard debate at 6 p.m. ET has invited Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum to participate. But the Paul campaign, miffed at its first time not qualifying for the primetime debate, is boycotting the event. “He will not let the media decide the tiers of this race and will instead take his message directly to the voters of New Hampshire and Iowa,” Paul’s campaign wrote on Tuesday.
Paul maintains that he’s a “top tier” candidate, though he didn’t qualify as placing in the top six in an average of recent national polls or the top five in recent Iowa and New Hampshire polls.
Fox Business Network’s first presidential debate, which took place Nov. 10, was the most watched live-streaming primary event ever, according to Fox, attracting more than 1.4 million concurrent streams at its peak. At the same time, Fox attracted a record 13.5 million TV viewers, many of whom took advantage of the same unbundling partnerships the network is offering again Thursday.
