Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump were “conspiring” to exclude him from the debates they agreed to participate in on Wednesday.
Biden and Trump said Wednesday they have accepted invitations to presidential debates hosted by CNN on June 27 and ABC News on September 10.
Currently, Kennedy would not qualify for the CNN debate in Atlanta based on criteria established by the network. Stefanie Spear, press secretary for the Kennedy campaign, told NBC News that Kennedy would accept an invitation from CNN to debate Biden and Trump if he qualified.
In a post on X, Kennedy expressed his anger at being excluded from the first general election debate.
“Presidents Trump and Biden are conspiring to lock America into a direct confrontation that 70% say they don’t want. the debate phase undermines democracy,” he said in your post.
RFK Jr. Has Already Hit CNN’s 15% Poll limit in two in four qualification surveys. But the network also announced that participants must “appear on enough state ballots to meet the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency before the eligibility deadline.”
Although ABC News has not yet published criteria for its debate, CNN’s guidelines are very similar to those the Commission on Presidential Debates had launched to set the standard for candidates to qualify for the debate.
The CPD, which traditionally hosted general election debates, had similar criteria for its events since the 2000 cycle. In 2000, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader criticized the CPD criteriawhat kept them off the debate stage
Many state deadlines for independents to have access to the polls don’t come until after the scheduled CNN debate.
In Ohio, for example, the Kennedy campaign announced that it had gathered the necessary signatures to appear on the ballot. But the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported last week that the campaign would wait to turn in signatures for certification until closer to Ohio’s Aug. 7 deadline.
Earlier this week, Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, announced they had qualified for the vote in Texas. But a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State said that although the campaign has dropped the petitions, they are still under review.
In a recent interview, Kennedy told Raymond Arroyo that his campaign is not immediately submitting signatures in some states to avoid extra scrutiny from the Democratic National Committee.
“The DNC has their huge operation, they had 3 billion dollars to spend to try to keep us out of the polls,” he said. “We’re not releasing our signatures until the last minute because that just gives them, you know, more targets to hit, in a much shorter period of time.”
According to the poll tracker on the campaign website, Kennedy currently could qualify for 187 electoral votes based on his count in states where signatures were collected.
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