American Values 2024, the super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign, said Tuesday it plans to spend $10 million to $15 million to get his name on the ballot in several competitive states next fall, while Kennedy himself says his campaign is focusing on a grassroots strategy.
The super PAC is targeting four key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada — as well as Illinois, Indiana, New York, California, Colorado, and Texas through ballot access and signature-gathering efforts independent of the Kennedy campaign's efforts, reports NBC News.
"We have chosen to pursue these critical states, some of them battlegrounds, due to the complexity of the state election codes and the volume of signatures necessary to achieve ballot access," Deirdre Goldfarb, the organization's special counsel for ballot access, said in a press release.
Kennedy however, has said his campaign will approach signature-gathering through a grassroots effort.
"Normally, independent candidates pay companies millions of dollars to gather signatures," he said in a recent statement. "We’re taking a different route that starts with our thousands of volunteers in every state.”
He is planning events next week in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lincoln, Nebraska, according to his campaign.
The signatures from the states being targeted by the super PAC supporting Kennedy account for about half the signatures required to get him on the ballot.
According to Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access News, an independent candidate needs to collect at least 900,000 signatures nationwide to appear on ballots in all states, at an estimated cost of $5-$12 per signature.
Given Kennedy is running as an independent, after dropping out of the race for the Democratic Party's nomination earlier this year, he must petition to be on ballots in each state in order to participate in the 2024 presidential race.
Getting onto the ballots in certain states could be key to the final results of the election, considering recent multi-way polls are showing that support for Kennedy is in the mid-teens to the low-20s, including in ballot tests conducted by Quinnipiac, CNN, and Fox News.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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