Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a problem that goes far beyond the nearly insurmountable long odds that third-party candidates have to overcome in order to win a national election: He’s not raising money.

Perhaps the biggest indicator that a presidential candidate is garnering support or interest from voters is whether his campaign is generating large amounts of small-dollar donations. Without these, a candidate is forced to rely on high-dollar donors who quickly reach the legal maximum contribution threshold for a federal election.

Yet for all the publicity he has garnered and the unusually high showing for a third-party candidate in national polling, Kennedy has not been able to excite those small-dollar donors into giving to his campaign. In the meantime, former President Donald Trump has seen a tidal wave of small-dollar donations in recent weeks.

A recent report from Politico detailed just how dire the campaign’s financial straits are. It effectively forced Kennedy to pick the fairly unknown but exceptionally wealthy Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. The report says the campaign would be in debt if it hadn’t been for a $10 million donation from Shanahan.

Through it all, the polling picture has remained remarkably stable. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, in a five-way race that includes Trump, President Joe Biden, Cornel West, and Jill Stein, Kennedy is polling a distant third place at 9%, the same position he was in February.

With his stagnant fundraising and flat polling numbers, Kennedy may have peaked too early. It is the same illness that has afflicted most other third-party candidates who have garnered significant buzz in election years past: unexpectedly high polling that craters as Election Day approaches.

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With less than two weeks to go until the first presidential debate, Kennedy’s odds of reversing his fortunes are slim. Trump and Biden both will easily qualify for the debate, but Kennedy only has three more days to meet the polling threshold requirement set by CNN as the standard for qualifying for the debate. Furthermore, he may be disqualified entirely as the network requires each candidate to be on the ballot in states totaling at least 270 electoral votes. And while Kennedy claims to have met that threshold, only a handful of states have certified his ballot access.

It’s a fairly safe bet to expect Kennedy to continue to poll around 10% for the foreseeable future, given the stated dissatisfaction with both major party nominees. But any chance he has at building the kind of political movement he envisioned would make him competitive on the national stage has stalled, just as his fundraising woes have grown. Missing the debate will only make things worse for him.