Long-shot candidates battle to get on state ballots

Outsider presidential candidates are vying to appear on as many ballots as possible before November, hoping to qualify in enough general election swing states to complicate the path for President Biden and former President Trump.

The battle for the ballots is underway as the race among incumbent-challenging Democrats, independents and third-party candidates has frustrated those who’d prefer to focus on Biden’s low popularity and Trump’s ascent.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent, and Democrats Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), Marianne Williamson and Cenk Uygur are strategizing over how to legally get their names in front of voters in key states before the fall. 

“For the candidates who have real support among voters, it costs very little to get on the ballot,” said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a national elections attorney at the law firm Cozen O’Connor. “All you need to do is print petitions and have your supporters circulate them to get the signatures necessary.”

Kennedy, whose double-digit support has concerned both parties, is being boosted by multiple outside super PACs that are spending millions of dollars to ensure he’s listed in places such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, where Biden is polling behind Trump. 

One Democratic strategist who worked on a presidential campaign in 2020 recalls the monumental task of getting their candidate to appear in enough places to be viable.

“It was difficult getting on the ballots of certain states,” a strategist and former campaign adviser wrote to The Hill. “We spent a lot of money canvassing states for signatures. Like A LOT.”

Without a groundswell of support, 2024’s nontraditional candidates are likely to face similar hurdles to those that came up in the last presidential cycle. 

“Getting on the ballots requires either a huge staff on the ground that can go knocking door to door or paying a canvassing firm a ton of money to get the signatures,” said the strategist, recalling efforts to prop up a candidate from the Democratic primary in 2020 who ultimately didn’t garner much traction. “Not to mention the fees for appearing on the ballot themselves.”

Kennedy’s name as the late President Kennedy’s nephew gives him a leg up over his rivals who are still working to build up their recognition with voters. 

The Kennedy-aligned American Values 2024 political action committee is zooming in on the states where he’ll likely have to push the hardest, including California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, New York and Texas.

Another group dubbed Kennedy Independent PAC started in October as an alternative to the two-party system. In a statement provided to The Hill, the committee’s treasurer, Sofia Karstens, noted the super PAC was founded to provide “FEC-allowed supplemental support for ballot access.” A third group, Fighting 4 One America PAC, registered in late November with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). 

Kennedy’s campaign has been telling supporters that he’ll need more than $18 million to get on all 51 ballots, signaling his intention to compete broadly on Election Day.

Just a handful of states Kennedy is targeting could complicate Biden’s victory, a fear for Democrats borne out of the slim margin of his last win against Trump. In 2020, Biden only outcompeted his GOP opponent by a few percentage points without an independent or third-party alternative.

This cycle, the incumbent president whose approval ratings have nosedived is already trailing Trump in places such as Michigan and Arizona, where Kennedy’s populist outsider pitch could catch on. The environmental attorney is arguing that both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt and voters deserve to have multiple options when choosing their next United States leader. 

As he moves to gain signatures behind the scenes, a series of legal complications have simultaneously emerged publicly in states where critics say they’re giving Biden an unfair advantage. In Florida, the Democratic Party’s executive committee placed Biden as the only Democrat running in the 2024 primary, bypassing Phillips, Williamson and Uygur. 

Following the decision of the executive committee, all three Democratic candidates publicly blasted the Florida Democrats. Michael Steinberg, a former congressional candidate and Tampa Bay attorney, filed a federal lawsuit against the state party arguing that Phillips in particular should be on the ballot. 

“I was very surprised,” the founder of the “Ballot Access News” newsletter Richard Winger said in an interview. “I think it was unprecedented for somebody that prominent and that mainstream to be barred under a law like that.” 

Philips entered the Democratic primary in October, much later than Kennedy and his rivals to the left.

“The biggest hurdle is that many states require that only certain residents of the state or registered voters in the state can circulate petitions for a candidate to get on the ballot,” Goldfeder said. “Only certain people can sign those petitions. So that becomes somewhat daunting in some states.”

Williamson is working to address similar issues but says she’s making significant headway. She listed well more than a dozen states where she already appears on the ballot, including general election battlegrounds such as Nevada and Texas, as well as early primary states South Carolina and New Hampshire 

“Trucking along,” Williamson told The Hill, tallying up the list of contests. “Working our way through them.

Meanwhile Uygur, who was born in Turkey, faces a unique and looming potential constitutional barrier to his candidacy, which he maintains he could take to the Supreme Court. The progressive media entrepreneur also faces similar struggles over the cost of the process and potential problems with Democratic state parties.

“A lot of times those state party chairs and delegates, their jobs depend on them, protecting the incumbent or protecting the powerful,” Uygur said, noting there are also requirements for a “tremendous number of signatures and a lot of states, which is just another way of driving up costs.”

“If someone is not a multimillionaire or has access to grassroots fundraising in the millions and perhaps tens of millions, it is very, very difficult to be able to just do ballot access let alone anything else in the campaign,” he said. 

“The Young Turks” founder has been rejected, for now, from appearing on ballots in states including Nevada, Arkansas and New Hampshire, but he will be included in Oklahoma’s presidential primary. 

“Oklahoma’s rock solid,” Uygur said about the state that was friendly to fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016. “We asked in every conceivable way. They say we are definitively on the ballot. They even did a ballot order. And two different papers in Oklahoma confirmed. We are definitely on the ballot.”