CTUP Senior Fellow, John Fund, is featured in the Wall Street Journal today, discussing CNN’s decision to bar Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the stage.

RFK Jr. will be the first major independent candidate to be disallowed participation in a presidential debate in 32 years. CNN disqualified RFK Jr. on a technicality – he failed to meet their conditions for inclusion: he only hit a 15 percent level of support in three rather than the needed four national polls and he hasn’t qualified for the ballot in enough states.

Fund notes that using this criteria would have banned Ross Perot from the debates in 1992. Perot won almost 20% of the vote.

It’s not clear at all whether having RFK Jr. in the race hurts Trump or Biden more. At one point, Trump had said he was fine with having Kennedy in the debate, but the Biden campaign was more insistent that he not be.

It seems to us that excluding him from being on the stage is a danger to democracy.