President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are attempting to sideline independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with their one-on-one debates.
On Wednesday, the two men agreed to appear onstage twice before the November election, once in June and again in September. But the terms to qualify, set by the two host networks, CNN and ABC News, could deny Kennedy a podium. The Biden and Trump campaigns reportedly back-channeled to cut out the commission that traditionally sets the terms of presidential debates.
Despite polling consistently in the double digits, Kennedy is not thought to have a real chance of winning the presidency in November, in part because he faces an uphill battle to appear on the ballot in all 50 states.
But Kennedy, the former environmental lawyer and son of onetime Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr., is the most popular independent presidential candidate since businessman Ross Perot ran in 1992, and Trump and Biden fear he could play spoiler in unpredictable ways. He is expected to siphon support from both parties, leading each campaign to treat him as a threat.
“RFK is interesting in that he pulls from both candidates versus Perot, who almost exclusively pulled from Bush,” Democrat Stefan Hankin, president of Lincoln Park Strategies, told the Washington Examiner. “It probably is not in the interest of either candidate to have him up there, but for different reasons.”
Kennedy could conceivably meet the 15% polling benchmark set by CNN to qualify for the debate, but he must also have a path to collecting 270 Electoral College votes, which requires him to be on the ballot in enough states.
Kennedy announced last week that he had ballot access in Delaware, in addition to California, Michigan, and Utah. His campaign also claims he has collected enough signatures for Idaho, Iowa, Hawaii, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.
Taken together, those 11 states, assuming he won them all, would represent 123 electoral votes.
“[I] don’t think he can mathematically get close to 270,” Hankin said of Kennedy.
The Biden and Trump campaigns, as well as the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, declined to comment on Kennedy in the context of the debates, but Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden campaign chairwoman, did underscore the president’s interest in one-on-one debates between Biden and Trump in a statement.
“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” she wrote. “No more games. No more chaos, no more debate about debates.”
Biden also simply smiled at a reporter who asked on Wednesday: “You don’t want to debate RFK Jr.?”
Biden’s demand and Trump’s acceptance of the debates appear to be “less about the debate than general concerns about RFK Jr.’s role as a spoiler,” according to Ed Lee, director of Emory University’s Alben W. Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation, and Dialogue.
University of Michigan debate director Aaron Kall agreed that one-on-one debates would help Biden and Trump as they become increasingly critical of Kennedy, but he also argued that third-party and independent candidates, historically, “haven’t really played a part in the process.”
“I think that’s what both campaigns would prefer,” he told the Washington Examiner.
The Biden campaign has attempted to define Kennedy as a fringe candidate associated with the MAGA Right, while the Trump camp highlights his environmental record to paint him as a liberal. Kennedy, for his part, responded to the debate schedule by accusing the two candidates of “colluding to lock America into a head-to-head match-up that 70% say they do not want.”
“Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy,” Kennedy posted on social media. “By excluding me from the stage, Presidents Biden and Trump seek to avoid discussion of their eight years of mutual failure including deficits, wars, lockdowns, chronic disease, and inflation.”
Kennedy later took to X to claim he will reach the participation threshold for the first debate, which will be moderated by CNN‘s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash on June 27 in Atlanta.
The debate hosted by ABC‘s David Muir and Linsey Davis, set at an undisclosed location for Sept. 10, will have similar criteria to qualify as CNN’s. Biden has dismissed the idea of a third debate on Fox News on Oct. 2.
Apart from Kennedy, the debates present risks and opportunities for both Trump and Biden. Emory University’s Lee noted there is a “long and storied” history surrounding debate negotiations as details about the two candidates emerge.
“Each candidate fights for the debate format that features topics, settings, oratorical expectations that accentuate their perceived strengths,” he said.
Biden’s insistence, for instance, on an in-studio debate, as opposed to one with a live audience, is “a smart move,” Lee added.
“Trump is a performer who takes many of his presentational cues from the audience to determine what to say, how he says it, and when he says it,” Lee said. “Some people remain perplexed about what makes Trump such an effective communicator. His genius lies in his ability to make the audience [an] integral part of the show through call-and-response interaction. He feeds off that energy.”
“A debate without a live audience removes that element,” he continued. “It seems the Biden campaign would prefer a much less lively debate and one that allows Trump to be Trump. They are aiming for a boring Biden-Trump debate with a few moments that end up on TikTok. The debate coach in me applauds them for trying to create a debate venue that eliminates one of Trump’s communication strengths.”
According to the University of Michigan’s Kall, the June debate, one of the earliest in modern presidential history, also indicates that the campaigns consider it to be in their best interest to debate based on Biden and Trump’s “advanced” ages.
“They don’t want to make it seem like they’re ducking a debate or there’s anything to hide,” he said.
Meanwhile, Biden maintains it is not because of his underperformance in most national and state polls. Trump is 1 percentage point ahead of Biden in two-person polling, but his lead expands to 3 points when accounting for third-party candidates Kennedy, Cornel West, and Jill Stein, according to RealClearPolitics.
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“Why debate in June? Are you worried about your position in the polls?” one reporter asked Biden on Wednesday.
Biden shook his head no, according to pool reports.
