WASHINGTON — Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he should be included in this year’s presidential debates with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — a three-way matchup that would be nearly unprecedented in debate history.

Three debates are scheduled to take place before the November election, the first of which is set for Sept. 16, according to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the nonprofit that organizes them.

Biden and Trump have not yet formally committed to them, but both men have signaled their willingness to debate each other in recent weeks.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney who formally ran for the Democratic primary nomination, told Fox News on May 1, “I should have a spot in those debates.”

He’s also singled out Trump in particular, challenging him to a head-to-head discussion at the Libertarian party convention in late May.

But, history is not on Kennedy’s side.

Since the first televised presidential debate in 1960, only one set of election year debates has featured a third-party candidate alongside the two major party nominees.

And since then, the requirements to get on stage have become stricter, according to historians.

The first and only three-way debates

The first and only three-way presidential debates to be hosted were held in the lead-up to the 1992 election, Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian at the Southern Methodist University, told McClatchy News in an email.

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