Cornel West, RFK Jr. submit signatures to get on NC ballot
North Carolina voters might soon find themselves with many options in this year’s presidential race, beyond just Democratic President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee.
New political parties had until Monday at noon to submit the required thousands of signatures, from voters around the state, that are needed to nominate a candidate for president. A spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections confirmed that three parties did so: the We The People Party, the Constitution Party and the Justice For All Party.
- We The People is the political party associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former Democratic President John F. Kennedy.
- Justice For All is the political party associated with Cornel West, the left-wing intellectual who has taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other prominent universities.
- The Constitution Party is the right-wing party that in 2020 nominated coal mining executive and convicted criminal Don Blankenship for president. He won 7,549 votes in North Carolina’s presidential election that year, or about 0.1% of the vote. The party’s 2024 nominee is Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist.
Terry, West and Kennedy aren’t guaranteed to be on the ballot in North Carolina just because they met Monday’s deadline to submit petitions backing their campaigns, however. State officials must now confirm that the signatures are legitimate.
The State Board of Elections will meet this month to vote on whether to approve or deny them once the signature verification work is finished. That meeting has yet to be scheduled.
Also this summer, two other parties could put candidates on the ballot in North Carolina — the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. Because those parties are more established, they weren’t required to go through the same process as the others to gather signatures showing their support. The Libertarian Party has nominated Chase Oliver as its candidate for president; the Green Party’s nominating convention is scheduled for next month.
Will NC voters consider 3rd parties?
While third-party presidential runs typically garner little support, there are lingering questions for Biden and Trump alike this year of whether that could change — and if so, which candidate would likely be harmed or helped more.
In recent polls, voters have said they want options other than a Trump-Biden rematch. In March, a WRAL News poll found the majority of likely North Carolina voters said they’d prefer the two major parties to nominate different candidates.
And in April, a Quinnipiac University poll found that nearly one in every five North Carolina voters said they’d vote for a third-party candidate rather than supporting either Trump or Biden.
Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020, but each time with less than 50% of the vote as third-party candidates won a small-but-significant level of support both times.
Third-party presidential candidates in North Carolina won a combined 4% of the vote in 2016 and 2% of the vote in 2020. But in 2024 — with polling showing voters disenchanted with Trump and Biden alike, and Kennedy and West offering the kind of name recognition that smaller parties typically lack — the results this year could be different.
The Quinnipiac poll found that when given only two choices, 48% of North Carolina voters backed Trump and 46% backed Biden, with the rest undecided.
But when given more options, Trump's support dropped to 41% and Biden's dropped to 38% — as 12% of voters said they'd vote for Kennedy, 3% said they'd vote for West and 3% said they'd vote for potential Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
However, the WRAL and Quinnipiac polls were conducted before Trump's conviction this past week on 34 felonies in a New York trial over hush money payments to a porn actress, intended to cover up their affair, as Trump was running for president in 2016.
WRAL reported last week that while Trump won North Carolina with just 75,000 votes more than Biden in 2020, those criminal convictions could swing as many as 350,000 Trump supporters in North Carolina away from him. That's based on past polling that found 13% of North Carolinians who voted for Trump in 2020 said they'd be less likely to vote for him again if he were to be convicted of a crime.
The hush money case was the first of four criminal cases involving Trump to go to trial; he also faces dozens more felony counts in cases related to his handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and stay in power despite his loss to Biden.
