For Cenk Uygur, the most disappointing thing about his long-shot bid for president has been the lack of support from civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, who have been unwilling to help him in his battle to get on state primary ballots.

Mr. Uygur is a Turkey-born naturalized citizen and he figured he’d be the perfect rallying point for those groups as he tries to break down constitutional barriers that reserve the presidency for “natural born” citizens.

Instead, he’s heard crickets.

“Not one of them helped,” he told The Washington Times.

Mr. Uygur, known for founding The Young Turks, a progressive show with a following among younger liberals, finds himself in the same position as former President Donald Trump: both men are trying to surmount roadblocks thrown up by states that contend the candidates are ineligible to serve as president — and therefore cannot appear on ballots.

For Mr. Trump it’s his actions surrounding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, which his challengers say makes him ineligible under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. For Mr. Uygur it’s his birth, and the fact that for more than 200 years the founding document’s Article II has seemed to exclude those born off U.S. soil and not to American parents.

Mr. Uyger understands the arguments. He just says they’re wrong. He says the 14th Amendment overturned the natural-born language when it said all persons born or naturalized have “equal protection of the laws.”

He argued there’s precedent for an amendment repealing part of the Constitution without explicitly saying it. For example, elsewhere in the 14th Amendment it overturns the three-fifths clause without ever using those words.

“The slaves were not natural-born citizens and no one thought they couldn’t run for president after the 14th Amendment was passed,”

He said the courts could also revisit the overall thrust of the 14th Amendment and conclude that prohibitions on discrimination apply to national origin, thus implicitly overturning the natural-born qualification for the presidency.

For an analogy, he pointed to women gaining the right to hold office, in some states even before the 19th Amendment guaranteed them the nationwide right to vote. What it took was a rethink of the terms of equality.

Mr. Uygur launched his campaign last year when nobody was challenging President Biden for the Democrats’ nomination. He said he jumped in because he’s convinced Mr. Trump will beat Mr. Biden, and he wanted to force the conversation on his party.

In an interview with The Times he seemed to waver between whether his candidacy was a serious attempt to derail Mr. Biden or a chance to make waves over what he sees as an injustice to naturalized citizens.

He said there was a path to victory but it required getting a federal court to agree with him that he belonged on ballots.

He made his big stand in South Carolina, where  U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. wasn’t buying it.

“Uygur is not the first naturalized candidate to assert such an argument. Unfortunately for him, each court to consider such an argument has repeatedly found that the Fourteenth Amendment has not repealed the natural born citizenship requirement,” the judge wrote in upholding the state’s blockade on Mr. Uygur.

In New Hampshire, the state Ballot Law Commission also upheld election officials’ decision to keep Mr. Uygur off.

“If, in the future, a final court decision invalidates the requirement that to run for President a person must be a ‘natural born citizen,’ or changes the common and traditional understanding of that term, the result may be different,” the five-member commission wrote in its decision.

Mr. Uygur said he has little faith that those state officials can get it right. For example, the state documents even cite the wrong place in the Constitution for the bar on non-natural-born citizens. He said the state said it was Article II, Section 1, Clause 4, but the actual language is found in Clause 5.

Mr. Uygur’s name will be on seven state ballots: Vermont, Minnesota, Texas and Oklahoma, all part of this week’s Super Tuesday contests, and Louisiana, North Dakota and Connecticut coming later in the season.

Notably, he is not on the ballot in Colorado, another Super Tuesday state. That’s where the state Supreme Court kicked Mr. Trump off its ballot in December, sparking a battle that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision is expected any day, though analysts said it was clear from oral argument that the high court will back Mr. Trump.

What’s not clear is whether that will help Mr. Uygur, whose case turns on a different part of the Constitution.

He was referenced in the oral argument last month by lawyers for Colorado’s secretary of state and the group of voters that brought the initial challenge to Mr. Trump’s name.

Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson, in arguing states have wide latitude to police their ballots. pointed out that the state hadn’t just denied the former president but also Mr Uygur.

“Just this election, there’s a candidate who Colorado excluded from the primary ballot who is on the ballot in other states even though he is not a natural-born citizen,” she said. “That’s a feature of our process. It’s not a bug.”

It doesn’t feel like much of a feature to Mr. Uygur, who said state officials aren’t up to the task of sorting out complex constitutional questions.

“State officials that made a decision to exclude me know literally nothing about constitutional law. That’s just a fact,” he told The Times. “If your answer to basic constitutional law questions is ‘Huh,’ you shouldn’t be making the decision. That’s kind of obvious, except the fact that it’s the opposite of what happens.”

Mr. Uygur says his lack of support for his cause is largely driven by the fact that he’s challenging President Biden. Had he been a Republican challenging Mr. Trump, he says he would have been welcomed by more coverage in the press — “They make a very active decision, we’re going to make very sure no one hears about this guy,” he said — and civil liberties groups.

“I think civil rights groups instantly would be ‘Of course you can run,’ especially since I’m a very harsh critic about Donald Trump,” Mr. Uygur told The Times.

“I just wish that I would have been treated as a person who was fighting for equality,” he said. “You can argue I shouldn’t have equality, a second-class citizen, one that shouldn’t have the same rights as a natural-born citizen, but I wish that fight for equality had been taken seriously.”

He said the insult is to 25 million naturalized citizens like him.

“We came hoping for the American dream, for equality. And when one of us ran for the presidency the whole country treated it with utter disdain,” he said. “That sucks. I hope they don’t do that to the next person.”

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.