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Can he win?The United States has a long history of rejecting independent or third-party presidential candidates. In fact, the last president to win without a party’s backing was George Washington, and he did it before there were political parties.The last third-party candidate to make it to the White House was Abraham Lincoln with the newly formed Republican Party.The last third-party candidate to pull more than single digits in the popular vote was Ross Perot, a businessman who won 19% in 1992 and 8% in 1996. But he won zero electoral votes.And while the independent share of the electorate is growing, it is still dwarfed by voters who consistently support Republican or Democratic candidates, even if they identify as independent.In other words, the odds are long.Kennedy’s case for optimism hinges on his relatively strong showing in a few national polls. Polls during the 2016 presidential campaign regularly put libertarian Gary Johnson’s support in the high single or low double digits, but he ultimately received only about 3% of the vote nationwide.Horse-race polls are also notoriously unreliable this far out from an election, and many Americans don’t know who Kennedy is. A February AP-NORC poll found, for instance, that 29% of Americans don’t know enough about Kennedy to have a view about him.Some of the people who say they’d support him may also be reacting to his famous last name rather than his actual pitch as a candidate. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted last spring found that 20% of people who said they would consider supporting Kennedy for the Democratic nomination — for which he was running at the time — said that their support was related to his last name and Kennedy family connections. Only 12% said it was because of support for his views and policies.But for any of that to matter, he has to get on the ballot.How does he get on the ballot?Forget getting elected; merely running for president is an arduous process, especially for candidates like Kennedy who don’t belong to a party.Every state has different rules, requiring an army of lawyers to make sure everything is done right. Most states require thousands of signatures.A pro-Kennedy super PAC is helping pay for Kennedy’s ballot access work in several states. His allies have created a political party to ease the process in some states by getting recognized as a party and making Kennedy its nominee.He has been approved for the ballot in Utah. His campaign and super PAC say he’s collected enough signatures to qualify in several other states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, though election officials in those states have not yet affirmed his candidacy.Kennedy has also said he’s talked with officials from the Libertarian Party, though it’s not clear what a tie-up between the two might look like.Who is working for him?Kennedy is looking to his family and his allies in the anti-vaccine world to staff his campaign, building a leadership team that is light on experience working in politics.His campaign manager is Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law who served as a CIA officer and has not worked in politics before.His communications director, Del Bigtree, is founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group. He also produced “Vaxxed,” an anti-vaccine film that promoted the discredited idea that the vaccines cause autism.Press secretary Stefanie Spear was an editor for the Children’s Health Defense news website. Charles Eisenstein, a New Age author, is an adviser.Kennedy also has staff and volunteers spread throughout states and focused on gathering signatures to get him on the ballot.
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Who is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and why is he running for president?
