Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing some pivotal choices as he seeks to gain ballot access across the country amid his independent presidential bid.

Kennedy has already gathered enough signatures to make the ballot in New Hampshire, Utah and Hawaii, and just this week he celebrated adding Nevada — a consequential swing state — to the list. His super PAC also says it has gotten enough support to appear on ballots in Georgia, Arizona and South Carolina. 

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weighing the possibility of joining the Libertarian Party amid difficulties in securing ballot access ahead of November. 

Kennedy left the Democratic Party in his long-shot bid against President Joe Biden in October to become an independent candidate. But getting on state ballots is an expensive challenge for independent candidates, and Kennedy has looked into ways to gain access with fewer voter signatures.

Libertarian Chase Oliver might determine which party takes control of the Senate. But not by winning his election.

The long-shot candidate for Georgia’s high-stakes Senate race could force a Dec. 6 runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, reshaping the dynamics of an already close contest and possibly leading to yet another scenario where all eyes focus on Georgia with the Senate majority on the line.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday rejected a Republican effort to remove a host of Libertarian candidates from the November ballot, saying the GOP did not bring their challenge soon enough.

In a unanimous opinion, the all-GOP court did not weigh in on the merits of the challenge but said the challenge came too late in the election cycle. The Libertarian Party nominated the candidates in April, the court said, and the GOP waited until earlier this month to challenge their candidacies.

To go by the post-election commentary, we libertarians are a powerful group holding sway over American politics and policy. Yet Team Blue and Team Red still enthusiastically embrace authoritarianism and scorn our insistence on letting people run their own lives.

Despite growing recognition that libertarians matter, Democrats and Republicans show little sign of extending an olive branch to people who oppose efforts to make government more abusive and intrusive. They know we exist, but they keep us in opposition.

At a Libertarian convention years ago, one of the party's candidates started saying, "When I'm president of the United States." I chuckled and responded: "Well, that isn't going to happen." We all knew then—and know now—that the Libertarian Party (L.P.) candidate has zero chance of ever sitting behind the Resolute Desk.

Libertarian Party (L.P.) state House candidate Bethany Baldes of Wyoming came just 53 votes away from winning a seat in 2018, in a race with fewer than 3,300 total votes cast. She was so close she'd been reported as the actual winner, over longtime Republican incumbent David Miller (then the House majority leader), before absentee ballots came in.

That's one reason why Apollo Pazell, an L.P. political operative working the Wyoming races, says in a phone interview today that they began their ground operation in Wyoming this year well before absentee ballots were first cast.

As of 9 a.m. ET Friday morning, 93 hours before the first voting locations open on Election Day, polling for Libertarian Party (L.P.) presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen exceeded the distance between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in five critical states: Texas (with its 38 electoral votes), Ohio (18), Georgia (16), Iowa (six), and, in extremely limited polling, Alaska (three).

All five states went for Trump by at least five percentage points in 2016. Texas hasn't voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter; Alaska hasn't since Lyndon B. Johnson.

As the Libertarian Party has established itself as the most electorally successful third party in the United States, voters have grown accustomed to the group's radical messaging against taxation, prohibition and war. One of the party's top 10 presidential primary finishers in 2020, after all, had his name legally changed to "Taxation Is Theft."

As various American cities descend into weeks or even monthslong street disorder, launched by anger and anguish over police brutality, standard American political ideas and groups seem equally powerless to preserve the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically give over large chunks of our fortunes and our choices to government. Many of these protests have evolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson, which is the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities and which has been done with careless glee dozens of times.