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According to the outlet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. failed to qualify for CNN’s June 27 presidential debate by the network’s Thursday deadline, a major blow to his independent presidential bid and cost him a chance to appear on a coveted national stage alongside President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.
Qualifying for the CNN debate, one of two scheduled before Election Day, would have been a big win for the Kennedy campaign: More than 73 million people tuned in to watch the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020, giving Kennedy a chance to face off against his opponent in front of a wide national audience.
No third-party or independent presidential candidate has taken the national debate stage since 1992, when Texas billionaire Ross Perot’s self-funded campaign gained momentum and won the right to debate three times with President George Bush and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the final weeks before the election.
But Kennedy failed to meet both standards. Facing mounting challenges ahead of the deadline, he accused CNN of conspiring with the Biden and Trump campaigns to exclude him from the debate and filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging the network violated campaign finance laws.
CNN has denied the accusations. Biden and Trump have a mutual interest in keeping Kennedy off the debate stage because he is stealing support from both candidates, and both campaigns are concerned that he could swing the election in key battleground states.
To qualify, Kennedy needed to receive at least 15 percent support in four nationally recognized polls, but by Thursday there were only three such polls: CNN, Quinnipiac University and Marquette University School of Law.
Kennedy also needed to officially run in enough states to secure the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. As of Thursday, he had less than a third of that number, according to a New York Times analysis. He is officially running in just six states – California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma and Utah – for a combined 89 electoral votes.
The ballot access requirement was far more onerous for independent presidential candidates than the polling requirement.
Kennedy only needed to conduct one qualifying poll in the final month before the deadline to meet polling requirements, but his position in the polls has stagnated in recent weeks.
By contrast, Kennedy’s voting access initiative has filed petitions to appear on the ballot in more than a dozen other states, collecting tens of thousands of signatures from registered voters in the process, but groups aligned with Biden are targeting the petitions in legal challenges.
The Kennedy campaign had argued that many of those states’ ballot petitions would be approved by the June 20 deadline, but on Thursday the campaign was still far from the 270-vote threshold. CNN previously said that “mere applications to appear on the ballot” do not count as appearing on the ballot in those states.
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