R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bilboro. This is The Daily.

Right. So you might remember that when Kennedy began his campaign...

I've come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

...back in April of 2023, he was really sort of a protest candidate...

They close every business in this country for a year.

...who was still really within the Democratic Party, but was pointing out, as he had been during the pandemic, some of the problems with the pandemic response.

As we all now recognize, the COVID vaccines were neither safe nor effective.

His skepticism of the COVID vaccine, his skepticism about childhood vaccination schedules...

I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy.

...his dissatisfaction with how President Biden had done his job, but it was really more of a niche audience. And when he left the Democratic Party and decided to run as an independent in October, he had to create a bigger audience for himself, a bigger platform, and stake out kind of a broader claim on the American electorate.

And how did he do that?

Well, you could hear it immediately in his speech back in October.

I'm here to declare myself an independent candidate.

When he was saying, I declare my independence, I hope to be at the forefront of a movement of the independent voter in the United States.

This country is ready for a history-making change.

The broad thrust of his argument is that the current political system, dominated by the Republican and the Democratic Party, is no longer working for Americans.

We've seen the Democratic, both the Democratic and the Republican Party, turn against the values that they traditionally represented for our country. And so many of us feel homeless today.

So he started that really in October. And since then, he's been taking this message of declaring independence for himself and trying to scoop up, draw in as many voters from across the country who, also, like him, feel disaffected or not represented by either the Democratic or Republican parties. that he sees as a kind of corrupt, stale duopoly.

Let's go, take back our country. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

That's exactly right. And part of that effort is staying in the news cycle and staying relevant. And so we saw that earlier this year when there was this big $7 million ad paid for by a super PAC supporting Kennedy.

$7 million?

$7 million.

A huge expenditure on a single ad.

A huge expenditure for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl. And what was interesting about this ad and caught a lot of viewers' attention, was that it was a repurposed presidential campaign ad from 1960 for John F. Kennedy, who was, of course, his uncle. Right.

Right, and he used a famous jingle that I think all of us know, even if we weren't born in the 1960s, which is the, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Ken, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

I'm glad you sang that.

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The ad was successful in generating a lot of news coverage and keeping Kennedy in the news for another few days after the Super Bowl. At the time, the head of the super PAC that bought it explained that the idea behind it was to get more people to realize that he was still running for president.

Mm-hmm, which- It did. It did.

Right, and he follows that ad up a month later with the announcement of his vice presidential running mate. Mm-hmm. And she is a pretty unknown figure. She is a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor. Her name is Nicole Shanahan.

And why does he pick her?

Well, in addition to sharing some of his political views, he picks her because she has a lot of money. She used to be married to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. Mm-hmm. Some estimates out there that she's worth billions of dollars and she can help fund this campaign.

Hmm.

This is all happening as his campaign and its allies are mounting this huge concerted effort that's essential to the survival of his candidacy, which is getting on the ballot in all 50 states. Now, they've been working on this behind the scenes since the moment he left the Democratic Party, but it's not until early 2024 that a legal effort, a signature gathering effort, all these things that have to happen and which cost a lot of money, start to really come together. And that's happening as he's making this big public splash.

Okay. So how does it go? trying to get actually on the ballot?

So let me just start by saying getting on the ballot is a state-by-state scramble. And critical to these efforts in basically, every state is getting thousands of signatures. If you're an independent candidate, you have to get, in some cases, tens of thousands of signatures from voters under very specific circumstances. Each state has its own specific rules for gathering signatures, its... Deadlines.

Mm-hmm. Right. And RFK, if we're being honest, is unlikely to tip the scales in the two previous states. you mentioned, Utah and Hawaii. Utah is a bright red state.

Right. And the story of how he got on the ballot in Michigan is kind of a fascinating one. Please tell us. So, rather than go through this whole arduous process of gathering thousands of signatures, the campaign found a kind of back door to getting on the ballot line through a very obscure party called the Natural Law Party. Never heard of it.

I just want to make sure I have this all correct. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets onto the ballot in this key swing state of Michigan by a convention of two people in a law office, and that's it.

That's it.

That's the backdoor.

That's the backdoor. No signatures, no fuss.

We'll be right back.

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Hello, this is Ywande Kamalaka from New York Times Cooking, and I'm sitting on a blanket with Melissa Clark. And we're having a picnic using recipes that feature some of our favorite summer produce. Ywande, what'd you bring? So this is a cucumber agua fresca. It's made with fresh cucumbers, ginger, and lime.

The Democratic Party has definitely come out of the gates with the most aggressive concern about Kennedy's candidacy.

And why is that?

Well, I think the answer to that is that third party and independent candidates have haunted the Democratic Party in presidential cycles in recent years. There's sort of the ghost of Ralph Nader and Jill Stein lurking there.

Ralph Nader, of course, seen as someone who might have influenced Al Gore's loss to George W. Bush.

Right, in 2000.. And then Jill Stein and the Green Party drew, I think, more than 30,000 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.. And that was widely seen as part of the reason why Hillary Clinton fell short there.

So this is the fear, basically, of Kennedy as spoiler for the Democrats.

Right. This is the fear that Kennedy could get just enough votes to tip the election in swing states to Donald Trump. So that's the broad underlying fear. There's a specific fear here, which is that the Democratic Party sees that Donald Trump's support has a high floor, right? It's going to be very hard to peel voters away from the hardcore Trump base.

Right. And it was a historic rebuke of Biden from what had been traditionally a Democratic base, Arab Americans in Michigan.

Right. He and his campaign saw the potential for a portion of his base to kind of go rogue and not vote for him. So Michigan encapsulates why RFK poses a threat to Biden, because the Democratic base right now is sort of restive. And in the mind of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, they want to keep this election about Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. They don't want there to be an opportunity for Democratic voters to take somebody else's box, especially not at Kennedy, not only in Michigan, but in all these other swing states, in Georgia, in North Carolina, in Nevada, in Arizona.

And the reason the Kennedy name is a specific threat is it's the most powerful name, perhaps, besides Clinton, in the history of the Democratic Party.

Right. And even though he's not a Democrat, up and down his policy platforms, he has a lot of positions that would probably appeal to Democrats. So he's pro-choice, he's pro-union, and he has a long history of supporting environmental stewardship.

OK, so what is Biden and the Democratic Party doing to try to fend off what they clearly see as a threat of RFK Jr. getting on all of these swing state ballots and really all the ballots around the country?

Right. So, heading into this ballot access push, the Biden campaign, the Democratic Party and some of the affiliated super PACs who are backing his reelection effort have gone sort of in an all-out legal assault on the Kennedy campaign and on third-party ballot access generally. So, broadly speaking, this means having a legal team based in Washington, D.C., but with tentacles all over the states, and they have been monitoring aggressively the ballot access efforts as they kind of emerge state by state. So, for example, one thing that emerged late last year is that a super PAC backing Kennedy pledged to spend up to $15 million to help him get on the ballot in some critical swing states. And immediately, the Democratic Party went into action and filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, saying, you can't do that, that's coordination.

Illegal coordination between the campaign and a super PAC.

Right. So a super PAC, which can raise unlimited amounts of money and spend it at will, they're not supposed to coordinate with the campaign. And the argument of the Democratic Party was, there's literally no way that a super PAC could help a candidate get on the ballot without coordination. that's illegal. And indeed, that super PAC, having announced that it had gotten enough signatures in a number of swing states, then backed off that effort publicly.

So a successful legal intervention by the Democrats.

So far, yes, it seems so. So that's a successful legal intervention on a national level. But we've also seen pushback against the Kennedy campaign from Democratic secretaries of state and elections officials in a number of states. So in Nevada, for example, earlier this year, they signed a petition and gathered more than 15,000 signatures to get him on the ballot as an independent. And then the Secretary of State, who is a Democrat, said, it looks like you might have done this wrong.

But clearly, this is the kind of thing that the Biden campaign and the Democrats nationally would encourage local Democrats to do on their behalf.

Right. Exactly. I mean, even without the explicit pressure from the Democratic Party, this is exactly what they're hoping will happen, is that Democratic secretaries of state and these elections officials will push back against efforts to get on the ballot that are maybe not coloring within the lines strictly by the letter of the law.

So it sounds like from the top of the Democratic Party all the way down to local Democratic officials, everyone who can find a lever of power that would throw a wrench in RFK Jr.'s ballot access is doing so. And I'm curious how much of that feels like kind of the standard playbook that a major party uses in a presidential race and how much stands out as unusually aggressive.

The Democratic Party would say they're just enforcing the rules and that, you know, local officials are doing their job. But of course, the Kennedy campaign sees this as a profoundly anti-democratic exercise and example of like how the party is trying to stifle his efforts to get on the ballot corruptly.

And so this would seem to explain, right, why the Kennedy campaign is resorting to tactics like we saw in Michigan, where, as you just told us, they get on the ballot using this obscure party with two members. The Kennedy folks, in their minds, are waging kind of electoral guerrilla warfare to get around these roadblocks that the Democrats are putting up.

That's right.

OK, so that's the Democrats. What are the Republicans and former President Trump doing about RFK Jr.'s efforts to get on the ballot? You had told us that Democrats are the more aggressive party in trying to combat Kennedy's candidacy, but how are the Republicans thinking about the role that he might play in this presidential race?

So the Republican Party and Donald Trump have been on an interesting journey with Kennedy since he became an independent candidate. On the one hand, on paper, you can actually see how a candidate like Kennedy poses a unique threat to Trump. He's sort of an anti-establishment voice. He says what's on his mind, for better or worse. He's pro-gun rights.

Sounds a bit like Trump.

Sounds a bit like Trump. And yet, over the past few months, the Republicans seem to have not been as concerned as you might expect. The Republican Party actually seemed to embrace Kennedy's candidacy for precisely the same reasons that the Democrats are so worried about him. They're looking at the same history of third party candidates and saying, great, it will temper the votes for Joe Biden and pave the way for President Trump's reelection. And so, various arms of the Republican Party and Trump's campaign had devised various ways to help prompt Kennedy up and paint him as a liberal in an effort to draw voters away from Biden.

So this is the philosophy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, thus RFK Jr. as an enemy to Joe Biden, should be a friend to the Trump campaign.

Exactly. But then, you know, as I said, this has been a journey. And in the past few days, we've seen sort of a reversal and sort of maybe Trump seeing Kennedy as a threat to his own candidacy. So on Truth Social, his social media platform, the other day, he described Kennedy as a Democrat plant who has been put in place to help Joe Biden win reelection. He said voting for, quote, unquote, Jr.

And do we know why? Trump has concluded that the previous thinking about Kennedy as potentially an ally and hurting Biden is no longer the right course?

We don't know why. I mean, we can surmise that there have been internal polls that might have suggested that Kennedy can draw equally from Donald Trump. But the Kennedy folks are proud of this because they say that they do draw from both sides. And, you know, if you talk to Kennedy volunteers, some of them have voted for Trump in the past. So I do think we're going to likely see a rhetorical shift and sort of a changing posture towards Kennedy, in particular, because now, evidently, Trump and the Republicans see his candidacy as a threat to them as well.

It strikes me, Rebecca, that there's some real risk for both Biden and Trump in going after RFK Jr., whether that's through the legal tactics we've been talking about on the Democratic side and so far, the rhetorical approach that the Republicans are taking, because Kennedy is casting himself as an alternative to the entrenched duopoly, to quote him, of these two big party machines. And so attacking him and specifically trying to keep him off the ballot might strongly reinforce that image and potentially galvanize support for him, right?

When I speak to people inside the Kennedy campaign, they constantly marvel at two things. One is that the Democratic Party repeatedly makes itself look profoundly undemocratic by, in their minds, sort of corruptly blocking their access to the ballot. And the other thing is that the Republican Party just seems to see them as a puppet, right? So these kinds of attacks from the Democrats and Republicans play right into his narrative about how he is rising above the two-party system. And he can now turn to these efforts and say, look, they're trying to keep me off the ballot in these states, and they're attacking me as super liberal, but they're also attacking me as super conservative.

Right. Do Republicans and Democrats let voters choose Kennedy or do they say you have no choice?

Right. And does depriving you of the choice to vote for Kennedy make him stronger?

Rebecca, thank you very much.

Thank you.

After we spoke with, Rebecca, Kennedy got on the ballot in yet another state, California, by once again working with a little known party. He is now on the ballot in four states. His campaign says he has enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in six more.

Can AI give us a window into the hidden parts of the natural world? Google Cloud AI is helping identify whale songs to keep humpback populations safe. Monitoring bird calls to protect their environment and mapping the abundance of species to assist in conservation efforts worldwide. From ecology to enterprise, learn how AI from Google Cloud is redefining what's possible at g.co forward slash cloud.

Here's what else you need to know today. The latest round of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas held in Cairo, hit an impasse on Sunday that prompted the delegation from Hamas to leave the talks.

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The leader of the United Nations World Food Program, Cindy McCain, said that parts of Gaza are experiencing a famine that is spreading across the territory because of the Israeli military operation occurring there. Finally, Israel said that it would shut down the Israeli operations of Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based TV network that is a major source of news in the Arab world and has frequently highlighted civilian suffering in Gaza during the war. Israel accused Al Jazeera of harming its national security and inciting violence against its soldiers. In response, Al Jazeera called the shutdown order a criminal act.

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