Josh Wingrove | (TNS) Bloomberg News
President Joe Biden’s campaign already sees one victory from the upcoming debate with Donald Trump — the absence of third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the stage.
Kennedy and other independent presidential contenders failed to meet the criteria to qualify for Thursday’s debate in Atlanta, according to host CNN, boosting Biden’s efforts to cast the 2024 race as a two-person contest between him and Trump.
The showdown comes as Biden looks to shore up the broad electoral coalition he’ll need to defeat Trump and his fervent conservative base. Some polls find Biden performing better against Trump head-to-head than in surveys where voters are presented with a larger pool of candidates, making it crucial for the Democrat to minimize the risk of his support draining away to outside challengers.
Biden’s team has sought to hammer the message that voters face a binary choice in November.
“It is Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and anyone that does anything but vote for Joe Biden is supporting Donald Trump,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a Puck podcast this week.
“There’s just one choice, and it’s before you on this stage,” she added.
A campaign adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said they plan to use the debate to spur supporters to speak with undecided family and friends about their vote.
Kennedy has blasted CNN and the two major-party campaigns for his exclusion, claiming he met the debate criteria. “My exclusion by Presidents Biden and Trump from the debate is undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly,” he said in a statement.
Kennedy on Thursday plans to answer the same questions posed to Biden and Trump in a livestream concurrent with the televised main event.
The challenge posed by independents like Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein won’t be neutralized by their failure to appear on the debate stage. The election could well be decided by just tens of thousands of votes scattered across as few as three battleground states, making the third parties potential spoilers.
Polls show Kennedy drawing from Biden and Trump voters in roughly equal measure, and both major-party campaigns have sought to discredit him among their supporters — while also trying to make him more appealing to the other side.
Indeed, the core of Kennedy’s support comes from so-called “double haters” — voters holding unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. About three in 10 battleground-state voters who say they won’t vote for either major-party candidate would vote for Kennedy if he were an option, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll last month.
Democrats have been engaged in a feverish push to keep Kennedy, a scion of one of their most famous dynasties, off ballots. Biden has touted the endorsements of other Kennedy family members to sideline his rival, the best polling independent in the U.S. in decades.
Trump has also intensified his attacks, casting Kennedy as a “Democratic plant.” Kennedy’s opposition to vaccine mandates, skepticism of gun-control measures and crusade against tech companies he accuses of censorship, align him closely with much of …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
