President Joe Biden‘s campaign was clear: he will only debate former President Donald Trump one-on-one.
That stops Robert F. Kennedy Jr. don’t like to try it.
As the deadline to qualify for the June 27 debate approaches, Kennedy, who is running as an independent president, has said he is confident he can still meet host CNN’s demands as he continues the raising allegations that the news organization manipulated the process. Last week, in an escalation of his pressure campaign on the host network, he filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against CNN, saying it had conspired with the Biden and Trump campaigns to exclude Kennedy from the debate, which violates campaign finance law.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
“CNN adopted criteria that they thought would keep me off stage,” Kennedy said in an interview that aired last week, adding that the network also interpreted those criteria in a way that “weighs them toward the candidates they want on stage. ”
CNN has denied the allegations. But Kennedy’s rivals do have an interest in removing him, as The New York Times previously reported. Kennedy is drawing support away from both Biden and Trump, and both campaigns are concerned about the potential for him to influence elections in key battleground states.
In at least one respect, Kennedy has reason for optimism. Recent polls have put Kennedy closer to qualifying for the debate stage than any third-party candidate in more than three decades. Kennedy must receive at least 15% support in four approved national polls by June 20 to be eligible for the debate.
He currently has three of those qualifying polls, one from CNN, one from Quinnipiac University and one from Marquette University Law School.
But there’s probably a bigger obstacle. If an independent or third-party candidate wants to appear on stage with Biden and Trump, that candidate must “appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270-vote electoral threshold to win the presidency,” according to rules published by CNN. In other words, Kennedy must be officially on the ballot in enough states so that – if he were to win them all – the total votes would amount to a majority in the Electoral College.
Kennedy currently has less than a third of that threshold, according to a Times analysis, and CNN’s June 20 deadline has put his campaign on a ticking clock.
Access to ballots was central to Kennedy’s independent bid from the start, and his campaign began early with an expanded bid to expand eligibility for the November ballot in all fifty states. His team has spent millions on consultants, paid petitioners and aggressive legal action – deploying a multi-pronged strategy to collect signatures to meet the state’s demands and push small political parties that already have voting rights to appoint Kennedy as their to adopt a standard bearer.
But another part of the campaign’s strategy in some cases was to deliberately delay filing paperwork with election officials to give his opponents less time to challenge his petitions, the Times reported. While some states give candidates until August or September to submit their ballot requests, CNN’s deadline to qualify for the debate phase is one week before the event.
Stefanie Spear, a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign, said Monday that the campaign planned to submit mail-in ballots in other states in the coming weeks in an effort to qualify for the debate. But CNN has previously said that “the mere request for access to ballots” does not count as a ballot in that state.
Kennedy’s sophisticated voting access operation has so far officially put him on the ballot in just six states — California, Utah, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Michigan and Delaware — with a total of 89 electoral college votes. That leaves him with only about a third of the votes needed and he must race against the clock to make up the difference with just over two weeks to go.
The campaign says he has qualified for the ballot in eleven other states, where petitions have been filed — often with tens of thousands of signatures, or minor party support — but where status has not yet been confirmed by the state: Nebraska, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Idaho, Nevada, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, New York and New Jersey.
If all of these additional states were confirmed, that would be an additional 149 votes, bringing Kennedy’s total to 238. But there is no guarantee that this will happen – and certainly no guarantee that it will happen in time for the June 27 debate.
State officials could block the effort, citing problems with the petitions, or the Democratic or Republican parties could take action against the campaign.
On Monday, the Kennedy campaign sued Nevada, where state officials had said in March that the campaign’s ballot was invalid because it was submitted earlier this year without a vice presidential running mate.
The Kennedy campaign has complained that the ballot access requirement to participate had set an unfair double standard for Kennedy, claiming that neither Biden nor Trump would qualify under those rules because they have not been officially nominated by their respective parties. Amaryllis Fox, Kennedy’s campaign manager, has said that “the 270 threshold makes no sense.”
In a statement, CNN rejected this wording, saying that “as their parties’ presumptive nominees, both Biden and Trump will meet” the ballot access requirement, adding that “RFK Jr. as an independent candidate, under applicable laws, does not do so.”
Spear said she expected Kennedy’s ballot requests in New York and Texas to be approved before the June 20 deadline, and that the campaign was not concerned about legal challenges to ballot access. A spokesperson for the New York State Board of Elections also said Monday that a decision on Kennedy’s ballot likely wouldn’t come until late summer. The petition, filed last week, was met with a dozen objections from residents, state records show. These challenges, which will be filed later this week in the filings, will need to be reviewed before the petition is approved or denied.
One way to gain quick access to elections is through minor party nominations, which is how Kennedy got on the ballot in California and Michigan.
But even that isn’t foolproof: Kennedy was nominated last month by the Reform Party — the party founded by Ross Perot — which the campaign celebrated as a ticket to the Florida elections. But the Reform Party had its status as a registered political party in Florida revoked last year after failing to pass a state audit. The party has filed a request to be reinstated, but it is unclear when or if that request will be approved by the state.
In most other states, there are no small parties available for Kennedy to work with.
The election requirement could still be an issue for Kennedy as well, as the clock ticks.
In addition to polls from CNN, Quinnipiac University and Marquette University Law School, CNN also accepts polls from ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, Monmouth University, NBC News, The New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as long as Kennedy shows at least 15% support. But it’s difficult to predict if or when Kennedy could get a fourth qualifying poll, in part because his support varies so wildly among the approved polls.
For example, The Times national poll from April showed Kennedy with just 2% support, while the Marquette poll in May had him at 17%.
c.2024 The New York Times Company
