Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that he turned in more than double the number of signatures required to gain ballot access in Texas for November's election.
Kennedy and his campaign announced that he and running mate Nicole Shanahan turned in 245,572 signatures to the Texas Secretary of State's office on Monday.
If so, the Lone Star State becomes, officially, the sixth state that the pair have qualified for, joining Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, and Oklahoma. However, the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign said it has collected enough signatures to qualify for eight more — New Hampshire, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio.
"It's official. Kennedy-Shanahan on Texas ballot! By collecting nearly a quarter of a million signatures in just two months, the campaign has shown it can overcome the most difficult ballot access requirement in the country," Kennedy's campaign press secretary Stefanie Spear said in a post to X on Monday.
The campaign claimed that RFK Jr. is the first independent candidate to qualify for the ballot in Texas since Pat Buchanan in 2000.
A Marist poll in March showed RFK Jr. getting 15% support in Texas, with Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump running away with 48% of the vote. President Joe Biden was at 36%, according to the survey.
Nationally, Kennedy is getting 10.8% support in the five-way polling average, according to RealClearPolitics. Trump leads Biden by 2.7 points in that outlook.
"I still think RFK Jr. could take more from Republican, and I think that's why Donald Trump's attacking him," onetime Republican Florida congressman turned MSNBC political commentator David Jolly said Saturday. "He is a MAGA crazy Republican; he's a vaccine denier. He denies science, he flip-flops on the issue of abortion and even his own VP candidate can't keep up with where he is day to day on the most important issue going into November."
Kennedy in an interview last week said women should be able to get an abortion, "even if it's full-term," a statement that surprised Shanahan.
"My understanding is that he absolutely believes in limits on abortion, and we've talked about this. I do not think, I don't know where that came from," she said.
Also Monday, Kennedy filed suit against Facebook parent Meta, claiming election interference. Kennedy and a super PAC that supports him, American Values 2024, alleges that Meta blocked a political advertisement, a 30-minute video about his life.
Kennedy claims that Meta censored the video by removing it and blocking users on its platforms from watching, sharing or posting a link to it. The lawsuit said Meta began censoring the May 3 video "within minutes."
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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