With the deadline quickly approaching for him to qualify for the June CNN presidential debate, RFK Jr. has yet to meet the sensible qualifications that CNN has set for participants. Which is as it should be. He doesn’t belong on the stage. His candidacy is at best a distraction and at worst a spoiler. What it most certainly is not is a serious bid for the presidency.
He is the candidate of confusion — a Kennedy who has no legitimate claim to the legacy he is running on, opposed unanimously by his own family. If he had a different name, he would be readily dismissed as the quack that he is. CNN should stick to its guns and keep him off the stage, and efforts to keep him off the ballot are critically important.
There are two criteria that CNN has set for a serious debate to help pick the next president. The first is a showing of at least 15 percent in four nationally recognized polls. Kennedy currently has three of those qualifying polls, one from CNN itself, and the other two from Quinnipiac University and Marquette University Law School. Those polls are in one sense outliers; a poll from The New York Times, in the same time period, has him as low as 2 percent, an indication of the variations in polling and the way the questions are asked. Still, if he can score in one more poll, he would have met one of the criteria.
The second criteria is the one Kennedy is not close to meeting, as the deadline for doing so draws nearer. An independent or third party, the CNN rules say, “must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency.” He must, in short, appear on enough ballots that if he won in every state where he is officially qualified for the ballot, he would have a majority of the Electoral College.
