(USNewsMag.com) – President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have agreed to two debates before November’s presidential election, and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t happy that he’s being left out.
After it was announced on Wednesday, May 15th, that two presidential debates would happen between Biden and Trump, Kennedy took to social media to express his discontent toward being excluded from the event. The independent candidate said that “keeping viable candidates off the debate stage” undermines democracy. Kennedy also boldly claimed that the two major candidates wanted to exclude him because they were “afraid” he “would win” the debate.
Kennedy originally launched his campaign as a Democrat in April 2023 before leaving the party and relaunching as an Independent a few months later in October 2023, officially walking away from the party that his family was long affiliated with. The Democrats all sidelined Kennedy, especially over his views on vaccines, and it became clear to him early on the campaign trail that Biden was already the presumptive nominee.
The first debate between Biden and Trump is scheduled for June 27th and will be hosted by CNN, and the second one is scheduled for Sept. 10th and will be hosted by ABC News. Before the announcement, there were longstanding doubts about whether any debates would happen at all after both candidates declined to participate in the schedule proposed by the Commission of Presidential Debates.
When he relaunched last year in October, Kennedy said his goal wasn’t to disrupt one candidate over the other but to disrupt both and the two-party system as a whole, and recent polls show he’s drawing about an equal amount of voters from Biden and Trump.
In his recent rebuke of being left out of the debates, Kennedy said the sitting president and former president are “the two most unpopular candidates in living memory” and that it is now time to break free from “the hammerlock of the two-party system.”
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