Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The the 2024 race has begun. So has the debate over debates.
:Katherine Koretski at NBC:Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first reaction to this week’s debate agreement between President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and CNN was to accuse them of “colluding” against him. But within hours, the independent presidential candidate changed his tune: He was going to try to win a one-month sprint to meet CNN’s criteria and crash the stage.
The question is whether both Kennedy’s ballot-accessballot-access machine and the state government offices that will process his petition signatures are capable of moving quickly enough to get him on enough state ballots by mid-June to meet the debate criteria — and what exactly the cable network’s criteria, which have been used for autumn presidential debates for decades, mean in a different context at the beginning of summer.
Kennedy’s campaign has long aimed to get on the ballot in all 50 states before Election Day, but the debate accelerated its timeline because one of the criteria for participation is being “on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency prior to the eligibility deadline” a week before the debate.
A major cash infusion from his running mate helped Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s longshot presidential campaign substantially ramp up spending on ballot access in April.
An $8 million donation from Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan helped the Kennedy campaign spend $6.5 million in the month of April, up nearly 50 percent from March. A firm that works on ballot access accounted for more than one third of the monthly expenditures, according to a campaign finance report filed with the Federal Election Commission Friday evening.
