Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr said Donald Trump and American voters were being treated unfairly by efforts across the country to block the former president from 2024 ballots. Kennedy's remarks came at a Wednesday press conference to spotlight his own first major milestone in his pursuit of 50-state ballot access: securing enough signatures to appear in the Utah general election.
Trump has already been declared ineligible to appear on Republican primary ballots in two states, as a court in Colorado and an unelected bureaucrat in Maine said he's disqualified under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, for having engaged in an "insurrection" in the form of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill.
As we reported Saturday, Colorado and Maine are just the start, as there are 20 states with lawsuits in progress aiming to eject Trump from the democratic process, and more to come. On Wednesday, RFK, Jr said the trend concerns him greatly.
“Donald Trump has not been convicted of an insurrection. Maybe he did it but, you know, he hasn’t been charged with it,” said Kennedy. “I don’t think it’s fair.” He also alluded to the fact that the ballot-blocking drive promises to stir the passions on the Trump side of an increasingly divided American electorate, saying it will make Trump backers "angry and frustrated and justifiably so."
If Trump is kept out of office through judicial fiat rather than being defeated in a fair election, his supporters will never accept the result. This country will become ungovernable.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 20, 2023
Separately, Tom Lyons, president of the Kennedy-boosting American Values 2024 PAC, told Sharyl Attkisson that Trump's dilemma relates to the difficulty that independent and third-party candidates have in making it to the ballot:
"We don’t need to be protected from a candidate by this sort of anti-democratic set of forces that is gaining traction in this country. Whether it’s Bobby Kennedy or Donald Trump or Joe Biden, it’s a direction that’s obviously bad for democracy.”
The main purpose of Wednesday's event was to announce that Kennedy has qualified to appear on the election ballot in Utah, having secured signatures from 1,000 registered voters. The campaign expects to spend $15 million on its nationwide ballot-access drive.
.@BreakingPointsN @krystalball + @esaagar ask about my efforts to get on the ballot in all 50 states, support among non-voters, and whether or not I’ll be on the debate stage with Trump + Biden. #Kennedy24 pic.twitter.com/rqovJqMh0v
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 28, 2023
Kennedy decried the thicket that he and similarly-situated candidates must navigate just to put their names in front of voters, saying that "arbitrary and capricious" rules create an "undemocratic lock that the major political parties have on this process...It’s all designed to keep third parties from getting on the ballot.”
Angling to play more than a mere spoiler in the November election, Kennedy shared some math that makes him optimistic:
“You could technically win the election with 34 percentage points because it’s winner take all. So all we have to do is take 4.5 percentage points from each President Trump and President Biden to win the national election, and I have 11 months to do that.”
He may be a little farther from that goal line than he suggests. His numbers may be in the right neighborhood if you look at a three-way race, but in a more realistic five-person race that includes Biden, Trump, Kennedy, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West, the current RealClearPolitics average has Trump at 40.6%, Biden at 35.6% and Kennedy at 13.0%.
