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A proposed gubernatorial forum hastily cobbled together in the hours after USC canceled its Tuesday debate fell apart because the candidates of color who were excluded from the previously planned event were unable to show up in person at KNBC-TV’s studio in Universal City, according to multiple sources.

Facing mounting pressure that its debate selection criteria excluded every candidate of color, the university canceled its debate late Monday. On Tuesday morning, billionaire Tom Steyer — a Democrat — proposed holding an alternative face-off, with KNBC moderating. But the candidates who had not been invited to the USC debate had already made other commitments.

“A lot of this came out of nowhere — there’s a debate and you’re not invited, followed by there’s no debate, and then maybe we should all hang out and have a conversation,” said Kyle Layman, a strategist advising former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

USC officials declined to comment on Tuesday’s developments — as did KABC-TV, one of the broadcast partners of the canceled debate. KNBC did not respond to a request for comment, but someone involved with planning a potential debate there said pulling together such an event in just a few hours was impossible, and also unfair to the candidates who had made other plans after initially being excluded from the USC debate.

“We looked into the possibility of doing something. It just wasn’t possible because of the last-minute logistics. It was not feasible,” said the person, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “We couldn’t get everybody here.”

The fact that the candidates excluded from the USC debate couldn’t find a way to participate in Tuesday evening’s alternative forum irritated some people involved in the planning, however. Becerra, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state Controller Betty Yee had loudly protested not being invited to the USC event.

“This is like probably one of the last opportunities they have to be with other leading contenders of the race, so why not take this opportunity?” said someone who took part in conversations about the proposed last-minute debate, who asked for anonymity to speak openly. “If the whole thing is about bringing your message to the voters, making sure voters have as much information as possible, talking about the issues that matter, wouldn’t you want to take every opportunity to do that?

“If you’re going to talk a big game about taking your message to voters, the importance of debates, why not do it?” this person said.

Becerra, Thurmond, Villaraigosa and Yee have reportedly formed an informal pact not to participate in any debate that does not include all of them, which Yee referenced in a Tuesday afternoon news conference.

“The idea that none of the candidates of color are going to be joining a debate is just inappropriate for a state like California,” Yee said. “We also need to have a commitment from all of the debate sponsors that they will include all of us going forward.”

Yee and Thurmond were not invited to the next major televised debate, which will take place April 1 at Fresno State University. Becerra and Villaraigosa had previously confirmed their attendance, according to a news release from the Western Growers Assn., one of the event’s sponsors.

And all four candidates of color, along with San José Mayor Matt Mahan, were not invited to a debate on April 22 in San Francisco that will be hosted by KRON-TV and broadcast on Nexstar Media Group stations throughout California.

“We don’t need gatekeepers,” Mahan said in a statement Tuesday evening. “I’m calling on my fellow candidates to work together to organize our own debates — so we can take our ideas for a better California to every corner of California. Let’s let the voters truly decide.”

The scrapped USC debate was going to be hosted by the institution’s Dornsife Center for the Political Future and co-sponsored by KABC and Univision. Six candidates had been invited to participate: Democrats Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, Mahan and Steyer; along with the leading Republicans, conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Candidates and elected officials called the criteria used to determine participation in the debate biased because it included Mahan, a white candidate who is polling near the bottom of the pack but is supported by notable names in the USC community. Hours after the debate was canceled, Steyer’s campaign sought to create an alternate event that would include all of the candidates.

“We were trying to do the right thing upon learning that the debate was canceled at USC,” said a member of Steyer’s campaign who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “Tom immediately was like, ‘We can do something alternative.’ People want to hear from the gubernatorial candidates. It was on the table. It was offered.

“NBC couldn’t get all the candidates here, but we tried,” this person said. “Given the short amount of time we were trying to put this together, it ultimately could not happen because not all the candidates could get to the studio.”

Thurmond, who was in Sacramento and Richmond on Tuesday, joined a political influencer on YouTube Tuesday evening, while Yee attended previously scheduled events with the East Area Progressive Democrats and a women’s group in the L.A. area. Villaraigosa had lined up other interviews at his Wilshire campaign office, Becerra was traveling, and Porter was scheduled to host a livestream on her Instagram account Tuesday evening.

HARTSVILLE, S.C. — Rachel Minus is not impressed by the Democratic presidential candidates. They’re just recycling tired talking points for African American voters like her, she said — with one curious exception.

The South Carolina millennial is all in for Tom Steyer, a Bay Area billionaire who’s been caricatured by critics as the definition of a rich, entitled white guy.

“I get the feeling he cares about us,” Minus said, as she waited for Steyer to take the stage here at the Jerusalem Baptist Church, a black congregation dating to the late 1800s. “The other candidates say things that are lip service. We have seen it year after year with the Democratic Party. So when they keep repeating the same talking points, you listen to it and it falls on deaf ears. He’s genuine.”

That sentiment is especially significant in a state where about 3 in 5 Democratic voters in the presidential primary four years ago were African Americans. Steyer’s aggressive spending here and in Nevada bought enough support in state polls to allow the former hedge-fund manager to qualify for last week’s nationally televised Democratic debate, much to the annoyance of some rivals and a chorus on social media.

As a campaigner, his personal politicking is uneven and he is prone to rambling. His one viral moment came when Steyer was caught on camera post-debate, awkwardly trying to greet rivals Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren even as the two were in the middle of a heated, private exchange.

“You got caught in the crossfire!” Congresswoman Alma Adams joked at a news conference Saturday morning next door in Charlotte, N.C. (The event was about Steyer’s plan for investment in historically black colleges and universities, but the two never got around to talking about the endorsement or the policy details.)

Steyer knows something about organizing in minority communities. In the years before running for president, he built a national advocacy machine that galvanized community activists, registered young voters and persuaded Californians to raise billions in taxes — all to advance the causes of social justice, action against climate change and affordable healthcare.

Although Washington insiders generally dismiss his recent momentum as likely to be short-lived, some of this area’s political denizens aren’t so sure.

“People are saying, ‘This guy, maybe we ought to look at him,’” said Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University. “Is it enough to prevail in February? Doubtful. But if the candidates come into the election here all bunched up and he has an established foothold, then who knows?”

A recent Fox News poll showed that Steyer has moved into second place in South Carolina, with 15% support among likely Democratic primary voters. While that’s 21 percentage points behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Steyer is running a “high-tech, high-touch” campaign, said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina political strategist unaffiliated in the race. “He’s got some soldiers on the field who know how to do war in South Carolina.”

Ninety percent of the campaign’s nearly 100 organizers are from South Carolina. They are in all of the state’s 46 counties, and more than half are organizing neighborhoods within 10 miles of where they were born. “Instead of bringing in folks from other states who need to learn the lay of land, our team is literally organizing their friends, their family and their neighbors,” said Brandon Upson, Steyer’s national organizing director.

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, a national co-chair of rival Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign, said he’s received more mail from Steyer than all the other candidates combined. (Bloomberg made a strategic decision to not compete in South Carolina, focusing his campaign instead on bigger states that vote later.)

At events in both North and South Carolina over the weekend, Steyer told diverse crowds that the media has gotten him all wrong. “I know that when I’m described in the press, I’m often described as a rich person or a billionaire,” Steyer told black leaders in Charlotte. “I think I’m a different person from that two-dimensional stereotype.”

He talked of his mother’s work as a tutor in a Brooklyn detention center. He stressed the community bank in Oakland that he ran with wife Kat Taylor, who puzzled some attendees at Steyer’s events by abruptly bursting into song, sometimes Billy Joel’s “Summer, Highland Falls,” when she introduced him. At every stop, he talked of the urgency of reparations for descendants of enslaved people. Steyer is not the only candidate emphasizing issues of race but he is doing so most persistently in South Carolina.

The anger Steyer seems to instill among President Trump’s supporters in inland South Carolina so intrigued Democrat Paula Wise, an African American insurance company employee, that she came to see him over the weekend. “It tells me this is somebody I really need to look at,” she quipped.

Not one of the many Democratic voters interviewed in the state were troubled by Steyer’s use of his deep bank account to gain traction.

“It is like a knife,” said Shalon Jordan, 40, a tax preparer in Hartsville. “You can use the knife to hurt somebody. Or you can make a great meal. If he is going to make a great meal with his billions, then that is a good thing.”

Supporters talk openly about the transactional nature of politics. As Johnnie Cordero, the head of the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina, announced his endorsement in Florence, he praised the hiring Steyer has done — from the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina.

“Part of what makes you a serious candidate for African Americans in South Carolina is the fact that you put your money where your mouth is,” Cordero said. “Why is it alright for a billionaire donor to support the Democratic Party, but that same billionaire donor cannot put his money where his mouth is and support a campaign for himself?”

Steyer raised the topic of his hedge-fund fortune only to press his case that he, as a financial titan, can best call out Trump as a fraud. And he distinguished himself from the other billionaire in the race, former New York Mayor Bloomberg.

“We have totally different backgrounds and experiences,” Steyer said as his campaign bus rolled through rural South Carolina. “If someone as rich as Bloomberg wants to represent Democrats … he especially needs to embrace a wealth tax.” Bloomberg, whose fortune dwarfs that of Steyer, says rich people should pay higher taxes, but he has pilloried wealth-tax proposals as Venezuelan-style socialism.

Both Steyer and Bloomberg emphasize the “climate emergency” more than other candidates. After a spate of natural disasters in the South, the issue seems to be catching on for Steyer. “Four years ago that may not have resonated here,” said Benjamin, the Columbia mayor. “Now it resonates a lot. We have seen several years of what were supposed to be ‘once in a lifetime’ events.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, left, and Tom Steyer at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Columbia, S.C.

(Sean Rayford / Getty Images)

Steyer is betting that his money will enable him to outlast Biden, who enjoys the most support among African American voters of any Democratic candidate, and that a weak showing by the former vice president in Iowa or New Hampshire, the first states to vote, will weaken Biden’s base of support in the South.

It’s a long-shot gamble, but Steyer takes encouragement from voters like Wes Simmons, a 64-year-old business consultant who was among the roughly 200 people in Charlotte who came to hear him Friday night.

“Biden is showing his age,” Simmons said. “He is not as sharp, not as quick. And Trump is a mean-spirited campaigner. There are folks wondering, what is the alternative? What else is out there?”