The establishment is blocking RFK’s path to the debate stage

Last week, the New York Times declared Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “2024’s X Factor,” citing new polling in key swing states that put RFK’s support in the 9 to 12 percent range. In some states, such as Nevada and Arizona, his candidacy seems to help Trump. In other states, like Michigan, he seems to pull from Trump and help Biden. He is, as the Times put it, “unpredictable” — but important.

And into this extremely unpredictable election cycle came another bombshell. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are eschewing tradition, bypassing the crusty old Committee on Presidential Debates, and agreeing to debate on their own terms — starting with a debate on CNN on June 27, far earlier than the typical general election debate.

That’s where the RFK story intersects with the elite consensus-pushers, who hope to keep the narrative away from a candidate whose unpredictability scares the establishment.

CNN published its criteria for the debate last week: Candidates must “appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency and receive at least 15 percent in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting,” which include 12 specific pollsters, most coming from major media organizations.

The ballot issue will be resolved separately, but the polling question is one that’s worth exploring — and goes beyond just the necessity of getting on the debate stage. The suppression of RFK support is both an issue of perception and reality, and has been going on for months. There is an obvious effort, from both sides of the aisle and some forces within the Acela-corridor media, to downplay Kennedy’s impact.

The polling average sites that have become popular in recent years are RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, and, more recently, The Hill’s Decision Desk HQ. Those sites have RFK at 9.6 percent, 10.1 percent and 8.1 percent respectively in the national polling average.

The sites use different standards that may weight polls more or less based on qualitative measures and recency. But they all give the perception that Kennedy is unviable at the moment as a national contender and nowhere close to the threshold to make the debate next month.

But when we dig into the crosstabs, some data is jumps out. In the New York Times poll last month, RFK was at just 2 percent. And in the NBC poll, he is at 1 percent. Why are these polls such outliers? Well, RFK wasn’t given as an option by those pollsters. The New York Times poll respondents were given only Biden and Trump as options. Likewise, the NBC poll question was, “If the election for president were held today, with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, for whom would you vote?”

Kennedy was a “volunteered” response, meaning a few respondents gave his name unprompted. This is a wildly different standard than other polls, and yet these poll results are counted toward the overall averages. The aggregators are thus artificially deflating the actual support RFK has right now. But NBC also asked a version of the question that included RFK by name, and he received 13 percent in that one.

I did not receive a response to requests for comment from RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as to why these polls were included in the overall average.

Part of RFK’s challenge in meeting the CNN criteria is exemplified in a poll from Monmouth. In the most recent national poll from a few weeks ago, Monmouth asked whether voters will “definitely” or “probably” support a candidate; 5 percent of respondents said they’d definitely support RFK, whereas 13 percent say they probably would. That, conceivably, looks like 18 percent, and enough to meet the threshold to qualify, even though it is a different version of the question.

But that won’t do it. When asked for comment, CNN indicated that Monmouth would need to produce a “traditional” ballot test poll for it to count toward the qualifications. For now, Kennedy is at the mercy of a pollster changing its format in time to give him an opportunity to meet the 15 percent threshold.

Where does Kennedy currently qualify? In CNN’s own poll, last out at the end of April, and in the Quinnipiac poll from more than a month ago, where RFK had 16 percent support. (We should pause here to note how wildly inconsistent the polls are this far out — Trump is up nine points over Biden according to CNN, whereas Quinnipiac has the two tied.)

We’ll likely see another, more recent poll from each of these outlets — particularly CNN, which will want to capitalize on its debate moment — so it’s conceivable that RFK is already halfway to the four needed polls, despite having the deck stacked against him.

But both major-party campaigns appear dead-set on preventing this.

“Our criteria for a one-on-one debate was made clear publicly, it was made clear to CNN and they understood our position when we accepted their offer,” an unnamed Biden adviser told Axios. The public statement from the Biden campaign chair also highlighted they would be “one-on-one debates” only. While Trump may say publicly he has “no problem” with RFK on the stage, a Trump campaign official told the Washington Post that a CNN producer “had given assurances…that ‘RFK will not be on the stage,’ after describing the criteria for the event.”

When asked for comment, CNN pointed to the qualifications that were published, and noted the eligibility for any candidate to qualify remains open.

“I’m happy to report that I will meet the criteria to participate in the @CNN debate before the June 20 deadline,” RFK posted on X last week. “I look forward to holding Presidents Biden and Trump accountable for their records in Atlanta on June 27 to give Americans the debate they deserve.”

Wishful thinking, perhaps. Because it certainly appears that the establishment in both the political and media realms are colluding to ensure that this doesn’t happen — and to suppress the perception of authentic support for a third-party wildcard that makes both sides of the aisle very nervous.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.