A majority of eligible U.S. voters said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should be "allowed" on the 2024 presidential ballot in all 50 states, according to a new poll conducted exclusively for Newsweek.
When asked: 'To what extent, if at all, do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Robert F Kennedy Jr. should be allowed on the ballot in all 50 states in the 2024 Presidential Election?' 28 percent of those surveyed answered "strongly agree," and another 26 percent responded "agree."
By contrast, only 7 percent replied "strongly disagree," with another 6 percent for "disagree." The remainder was made up of 24 percent who answered "neither agree nor disagree" and 9 percent who said "don't know." The survey of 1,500 eligible U.S. voters was conducted for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies online on May 1.
While Kennedy Jr. initially ran for the Democratic Party nomination, he lost the primary to the incumbent, President Joe Biden, and instead announced his intention to seek election as an independent candidate.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy Jr. campaign told Newsweek: "We find this poll hopeful, not only for our candidate, but as a barometer of Americans' faith in democracy.
"The campaign has launched a robust ballot access plan to ensure the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
"Thanks to the efforts of over 100,000 volunteers, we are currently on the ballot in three states including Utah, Michigan, and California. The campaign has collected enough signatures for ballot access in seven other states including New Hampshire, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, and Iowa."
The rules for an independent candidate to get on the ballot vary from state to state, but generally require them to gather a certain number of signatures, though in a handful of cases a financial payment may be accepted instead.
The states that include Kennedy Jr. on their ballot could have a decisive impact on the national election outcome, due to his ability to pull voters from both Biden and Trump. A recent NBC News survey found the inclusion of Kennedy Jr., along with the Green Party's Jill Stein and independent Cornel West, shifted the result from a two-point Donald Trump lead to a two-point Biden lead.
However, a separate poll from Emerson College/The Hill found Kennedy Jr. damages Biden more than Trump in the key battleground states of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while taking support from them equally in Arizona and Michigan.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that in a five-way contest Trump would get 42 percent of the vote, ahead of 40 percent for Biden, 12 percent for Kennedy Jr., 2 percent for Cornel West and 1percent for Jill Stein.
In early May, election officials in three states confirmed to ABC News that Kennedy Jr. would be on their ballot in November, while the candidate's team also claimed he'd met the requirements for a further seven.
In a number of states Kennedy Jr. is attempting to formally appear as the candidate of a local registered political party, meaning he doesn't have to require a long list of signatures from voters in those states.
In California and Michigan, respectively, he will appear as the candidate of the American Independent Party of California and the Natural Law Party of Michigan.
Kennedy Jr. also hoped to get on the ballot in Alaska as the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party candidate, but this bid was rejected by its members.
Trump recently launched a bitter attack on Kennedy via his Truth Social website.
The presumptive Republican candidate wrote: "So bad that FoxNews puts RFK Jr., considered the dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan, on their fairly conservative platform so much.
"Competitive networks don't want anything to do with him. He's a Radical Left Lunatic whose crazy Climate Change views make the Democrat's Green New Scam look Conservative."
Update 5/7/24, 9:55 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with comment from the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign.
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James Bickerton is a Newsweek U.S. News reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is covering U.S. politics and world ... Read more
