Democrat-turned-independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump last week, will be on the ballot in Virginia despite his effort to remove his name from ballots in “10 battleground states.”
The Virginia Department of Elections on Thursday approved Kennedy’s placement on the November 2024 general election ballot while informing independent candidate Cornel West that he did not qualify, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Virginia’s election officials said West, a socialist and race activist, did not file the necessary paperwork.
Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told the Times-Dispatch that West’s exclusion from the Virginia ballot is “significant.”
“This is one of those things that flies under the radar for many people, but it is a potentially critical factor in the outcome of the election in some places,” he said.
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In 2020, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen received more than 64,000 votes in Virginia, and all other third-party candidates received a combined 19,765 votes.
The candidates who qualified for 2024 ballot placement in Virginia include Kennedy, Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver. Election officials must still review the forms of three other third-party candidates who could still make it on the ballot, according to the Times-Dispatch. Stein was accused by Democrats in 2016 of taking votes away from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and ultimately helping Trump win the election.
Virginia state Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker wasn’t concerned with the election officials’ decisions, arguing that neither Kennedy’s inclusion nor West’s exclusion from the ballot would affect the results in Virginia.
“The bottom line is it doesn’t change anything. They’re not serious candidates and we’ve got serious voters in Virginia,” she said.
Kennedy said last week after suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump that he would seek to remove himself from the ballot in states where he could act as a “spoiler.” Virginia, while going reliably for Democratic presidential candidates since 2008, is showing a closer race in the polling this year, giving Republicans a glimmer of hope for a major upset there. Vice President Kamala Harris currently leads Trump by 4 points in the RealClearPolitics average of Virginia polls after President Joe Biden beat Trump by 10 points in the state in 2020.
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Kennedy has also failed to get his name removed from ballots in the battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democrat-turned-Trump supporter blasted the Democratic Party in his speech announcing his campaign’s suspension, saying, “In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.”
