Every other election debates are held by a nonpartisan organization and a third party that meets certain requirements can also join.
Because political parties are private organizations not attached to the government.
This election both parties agreed they will only do debates that they arrange.
Meaning they're in charge of who shows up, and they'll never both agree to let anyone else join.
People keep acting like it doesn't matter, but it's a big deal.
Edit:
Obviously RFK is a joke and won't win, but we shouldn't just shrug as the two private parties seize more and more power when they have zero accountability to voters and neither side will ever be held accountable by their own politicians.
Every other election debates are held by a nonpartisan organization and a third party that meets certain requirements can also join.
They change the rules rather arbitrarily to suit their needs anyway. During the 2000 election Nader was excluded from debates under the new rule that the green party had to have gotten 5% of the vote (nationally) in the previous presidential election to quality. Some of the votes for Nader, that helped get Bush elected, were cast to make sure the green party got that 5% for the next election. They didn't, it ended up at 4% and change, but the rule was changed for 2004 anyway so it wouldn't have mattered.
He's being left out not because Trump or Biden are keeping him out. He's being left out because he does not meet the minimum requirements to qualify for a place on the debate stage. He has to have a certain percentage of voters polling for him and he simply does not have that.
The lower one side goes, the lower the other side goes. How are you gonna vote out fascism when the Democrats go a low as they can simply because Republicans go lower. Trump doesn't even need to win at this point for fascism to continue encroaching because Dems will continue to strip liberties like fair debates away under the guise of stopping the other sides fascism. Every day we march rightward.
Colluding involves communication and coordinated ation. They don't need to collude because excluding third parties is in their best interest.
Both parties are still wary after the outcome in 1992 when Ross Perot received nearly 20% of the vote after being included in the debates. Neither want to risk having a wildcard on stage.
Kennedy has already hit CNN’s 15% polling threshold in two out of four qualifying polls. But the network also announced that participants must “appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency prior to the eligibility deadline.”
I think as a bare minimum requirement, being able to appear on the ballots of enough states to actually have a chance of winning makes perfect sense as a rule. With all the things to shit on the parties for, why make up a strawman?
I actually tuned in to his Rogan episode to kind of hear him out and see what he was all about (surprise, it's antivax conspiracy shit) and yeah man, idk how he even thinks a debate will help him with a voice like that. He's super hard to listen to.
This shouldn't be a big surprise; In a winner-take-all contest, the two bigger players are going to gang up and eliminate the smaller one first before focusing on each other. Neither Biden nor Trump are going to allow RFK to waltz in and get a boost off of those two fighting each other; it would just make it harder for them to eliminate him later.
It shouldn't be a surprise because there are rules to qualify for presidential debates and he does not meet the minimum requirements. It has nothing to do with Biden or Trump.
Rfk jr should just accept this as the blessing it is. These events aren’t debates, these are like all the worst parts of reality tv stitched together into an inane freakshow of attacking one another and dodging questions, without any accountability for their lies and deceit. It’s void of nearly any intellectual nutrition, served as entertainment to the American public.
He should get someone to make a high quality edit of himself in there answering the questions alongside them and then release the video himself. He's not great, but the juxtaposition with those two would make him look great and people would get a kick out of some nice editing/AI tricks or whatever.