What was supposed to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s introduction to a national audience on the presidential debate stage now looks increasingly improbable, as the anti-vaccine activist’s last ditch efforts to get into the first televised, national debate have been denied by CNN.
Despite Kennedy’s claims of surpassing ballot access requirements set by CNN for its June 20th debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, some state election officials claimed the controversial third-party candidate is still not officially confirmed on the ballot where his campaign has declared he has qualified.
CNN’s rules technically say that candidates must appear on sufficient state ballots to earn 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency. They must also register at least 15 percent support across multiple national polls.
While Kennedy has passed that bar, he hasn’t officially been added to the ballots in enough states yet — barring him an invite to CNN’s debate.
Kennedy is officially on the ballot in Utah, Delaware, Oklahoma, Michigan, Tennessee, California and Hawaii at this point – totaling just 100 electoral votes. His campaign says he’s technically qualified — and is in the process of being added to — almost every state. But CNN’s timeline will expire before he can officially reach the 270 threshold by Thursday’s cutoff.
Kennedy, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has waged an unorthodox campaign since launching his long-shot White House bid in April. After amassing a following among anti-vaccine circles, the environmental activist has attempted to leverage that following into a broader populist coalition that drains significant votes from Biden… and from Trump.
But Kennedy has faced a patchwork of complicated ballot access rules that vary by state for independent candidates unaffiliated with a major party.
In many places, he has resorted to creative workarounds that have generated confusion.
For instance, the campaign claimed ballot qualification in Florida by accepting the nomination of the obscure Reform Party. Yet state officials confirmed that paperwork remains outstanding, with the party chair admitting “someone got ahead of the horse” with that announcement.
Kennedy’s formation of his own “We the People” party to expedite ballot access in states like Hawaii and North Carolina has also hit bureaucratic snags, with election authorities in those states claiming they have not yet received or certified the party’s nominees.
In New York, where Kennedy’s team said it spent over $1 million gathering petition signatures as an independent candidate, it now faces a daunting series of challenges spearheaded by Democratic Party-aligned groups alleging irregularities in signatures that could disqualify him.
Amid the chaos, Kennedy has frequently lashed out at the “rigged system” he says is unfairly obstructing his campaign. His lawsuit leveling collusion allegations against Biden, Trump, CNN and others over the debate criteria is unlikely to gain traction before the Thursday cutoff.
Ultimately, time appears to have been Kennedy’s biggest foe.
“It’s just a moment that’s not working for him,” Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University in Georgia who studies third parties, told The Washington Post.
While most third-party candidates relish having extra runway to gather signatures in the typically late summer, Kennedy rushed to share a national debate stage that may prove elusive given the accelerated timeline dictated by CNN’s unusually early debate.
His complaints about being excluded have already portrayed Kennedy as a victim of an establishment bent on silencing dissenting voices.
As the former environmental lawyer continues the challenging and expensive campaign to simply make ballots in enough jurisdictions, the opening debate spotlight will move forward without him – denying Kennedy his biggest mainstream audience yet while fueling the narrative of persecution his campaign has repeatedly claimed.