RFK Jr. wants to debate Biden, Trump. But just how rare is a 3-way presidential debate?
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he should be included in this year’s presidential debates with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — a three-way matchup that would be nearly unprecedented in debate history.
Three debates are scheduled to take place before the November election, the first of which is set for Sept. 16, according to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the nonprofit that organizes them.
Biden and Trump have not yet formally committed to them, but both men have signaled their willingness to debate each other in recent weeks.
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Kennedy, an environmental attorney who formally ran for the Democratic primary nomination, told Fox News on May 1, “I should have a spot in those debates.”
He’s also singled out Trump in particular, challenging him to a head-to-head discussion at the Libertarian party convention in late May.
But, history is not on Kennedy’s side.
Since the first televised presidential debate in 1960, only one set of election year debates has featured a third-party candidate alongside the two major party nominees.
And since then, the requirements to get on stage have become stricter, according to historians.
The first and only three-way debates
The first and only three-way presidential debates to be hosted were held in the lead-up to the 1992 election, Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian at the Southern Methodist University, told McClatchy News in an email.
Independent candidate Ross Perot joined Republican President George H.W. Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic nominee, for three debates hosted by the CPD.
“Perot was invited to take part because his high polling numbers made it impossible to exclude him,” Michael Kazin, a presidential historian at Georgetown University, told McClatchy News in an email.
In June 1992, 52% of voters held a favorable view of Perot, a business magnate, according to Gallup.
During the first debate, held on Oct. 11, Perot’s “folksy populism struck a positive chord in polls,” but his performance did not significantly shift voters’ preferences, according to The New York Times.
Ultimately, Perot lost the general election to Clinton, garnering 19% of the popular vote but no electoral college votes.
After Perot qualified for the CPD’s 1992 debates, the commission altered its criteria required to participate, Chervinsky said.
After the CPD “received so much criticism” for allowing Perot to participate, the commission raised the threshold of national support a candidate needs to 15% in 2000, Chervinsky said.
While Perot ran again in 1996, he did not meet the criteria to qualify for the debates, Thomas Balcerski, a presidential historian at Eastern Connecticut State University, told McClatchy News in an email.
“Perhaps it is a good comparison to RFK Jr. who similarly has been excluded from prime time,” Balcerski said.
Perot sued the CPD in September 1996, seeking to force his way onto the debate stage and claiming his exclusion was unconstitutional and that it only served to prop up the two-party system, according to The New York Times. The commission said he was excluded because he “did not have a realistic chance of winning the election,” according to the outlet.
However, a federal court dismissed the case in October 1996, saying Perot lacked jurisdiction, according to CNN.
Today’s debate requirements
Today, the CPD has three requirements that candidates must meet to qualify for the debates.
Firstly, they must be allowed to hold presidential office under the Constitution.
They must also “appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College; (and) have a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate, as determined by five national public opinion polling organizations.”
The 15% threshold has been criticized by some in recent years for being to restrictive, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who, in 2016, said it was “probably too high,” according to Politico.
Whether Kennedy meets all of the qualifications is not clear.
He told CNN in April that he would have “no problem” getting on the ballot in every state. So far, he’s qualified for ballot access in five states: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Utah and Michigan, the outlet reported.
He has also reached double-digit support in polls placing him in a three-way matchup with Biden and Trump. In an April Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris poll, Kennedy garnered 12% support against Trump’s 44% and Biden’s 38%.
“Mr. Kennedy will definitely be on the debate stage,” Stefanie Spear, his press secretary, told the New York Post in November. “Americans deserve transparency and a chance to see their candidates share their vision for the country.”
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