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The super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign announced plans Tuesday to spend $10 million to $15 million on efforts to get Kennedy on the ballot next fall.
The states the super PAC is targeting include some of the most competitive states in the 2020 election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — as well as California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, New York and Texas. The group, American Values 2024, will be pursuing signature-gathering and other ballot access efforts independent to the campaign’s own efforts, the organization said in a press release.
“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 super PAC’s special counsel for ballot access, said in the release.
According to the release, signatures from these states represent almost half of the required signatures to get Kennedy on the ballot nationwide.
Since separating from the Democratic Party earlier this year, Kennedy will need to petition his way onto the ballot as an independent in each state in order to participate in the 2024 presidential race. And where he gets on the ballot could be significant in the final results, given that Kennedy is getting support in the mid-teens to the low 20s in recent multi-way polls, including ballot tests from CNN, Quinnipiac and Fox News.
Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access News, estimated in a recent NBC News story that an independent candidate will need to collect at least 900,000 signatures around the nation to appear on every state ballot. Winger estimated that could cost $5 to $12 per signature gathered.
Kennedy’s campaign, on the other hand, is going to approach this process differently by launching a grassroots effort, it has said.
“Normally, independent candidates pay companies millions of dollars to gather signatures,” Kennedy explained in a recent press release. “We’re taking a different route that starts with our thousands of volunteers in every state.”
Kennedy is set to hold events in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Missouri, next week, according to his campaign.