Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his plans to visit Utah in the coming week.
Kennedy launched his campaign as a Democrat initially but switched to be an independent candidate last month. His team is in the process of collecting signatures from states in order to appear on the 2024 ballot. The next rally that he will attend will be in Salt Lake City on Nov. 30.
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Utah has 574,075 registered unaffiliated voters, which has steadily increased year over year. Over 100,000 of them are reportedly inactive as they have not voted in at least two consecutive general elections. The number of unaffiliated voters is more than double the number of Democratic voters and over half of the Republican voters.
During the 2022 election, the state's Democratic Party opted not to put forth its own candidate against Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) but instead endorsed independent candidate Evan McMullin, who was unsuccessful in unseating Lee. The party's former candidate against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) in 2018, Jenny Wilson, is now the Salt Lake County mayor, where Kennedy is slated to visit.
Where Kennedy's next stop will be remains to be seen. His most recent was in South Carolina, where voters do not register with a party to vote but decide on which party's ballot to participate in. Former President Donald Trump won both South Carolina and Utah during the 2020 election. However, the state's former governor Nikki Haley is also in the running for president as a Republican candidate.
Meanwhile, neighboring Arizona totes some 1,450,697 unaffiliated voters which makes up 34% of all registered voters there. This is roughly 5,000 more voters than are registered as Republicans. In 2020, Arizona flipped from its usual nature of leaning Republican and voted in now-President Joe Biden.
Salt Lake City will also be the site of the third and final presidential debate in 2024. This comes after the state also hosted the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris in 2020.
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Kennedy faces another opponent in activist Cornel West, who has run as an independent from the beginning of his campaign. There are three other Democratic candidates running to unseat Biden, author Marianne Williamson, news anchor Cenk Uygur, and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN).
The Washington Examiner reached out to Kennedy's campaign for comment on his Utah 2024 stop.