The prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatening to upend the presidential race went from idea to reality on Thursday in one of the country’s most consequential battlegrounds, as Mr. Kennedy qualified for the ballot in Michigan.
The Natural Law Party’s decision to grant Mr. Kennedy its ballot line in November ensures that he will be a factor in a crucial swing state where the presidential election is expected to be incredibly close and where President Biden is already showing his vulnerability important democratic constituencies. During the Michigan primary in February, a protest movement against Mr. Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza gained widespread support.
Mr. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and scion of perhaps the country’s most famous Democratic family, is running as an independent in 2024 and is performing better in early polls than any candidate since Ross Perot, the self-financing billionaire who ran in the 1990s.
His independent candidacy has earned him the alienation of his own family – who campaigned with Mr Biden in Pennsylvania this week – and many of his former colleagues in the environmental movement, who publicly condemned his candidacy on Friday.
Mr. Kennedy has emerged as a leader in vaccine skepticism both before and after his Covid-19 vaccination and has dabbled in conspiracy theories, including about the assassination of his father, Robert F. Kennedy. He had initially declared his 2024 campaign as a Democratic challenger to Mr Biden – and was heavily featured in conservative media – until he switched last fall to run as an independent.
Both parties are already rushing to define Mr. Kennedy as he fights to get on the national ballot.
Brian Hughes, an adviser to Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, called Mr. Kennedy “a leftist and liberal with a history of supporting an extreme environmental agenda that rivals Joe Biden in its ability to destroy American jobs.”
Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who works with the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats would work to ensure voters “know how extreme his positions are and that he is being recruited to run by Trump allies and Trump’s biggest candidate.” Funded by donors to corrupt him.” Trump in November.” Timothy Mellon, the reclusive banking heir, has donated $15 million to a pro-Trump super PAC and $20 million to a pro-Kennedy super PAC .
The Biden operation is taking Mr. Kennedy’s threat seriously, inviting a phalanx of the Kennedy clan to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day and then holding an event in Philadelphia on Thursday attended by Mr. Kennedy’s relatives, including six of his siblings , are present you supported the president.
“We can’t do anything that takes even one vote away from President Biden,” Joseph P. Kennedy II, Mr. Kennedy’s eldest brother and a former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said in an interview. “If you put Kennedy’s name on the ballot, Democrats will feel torn.”
On Sunday, Mr. Kennedy will celebrate his entry into the Michigan vote with a comedy show outside Detroit, his campaign’s fundraising message said. The event will be headlined by Rob Schneider, the Hollywood comedian who has questioned the safety of vaccines. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Some Michigan Democrats expressed concern about Mr. Kennedy’s presence on the ballot given the close election results, his famous name and Mr. Biden’s efforts to reunite the coalition that carried him to victory in 2020.
“In a very close race, we could be talking about a few thousand votes that could swing the outcome one way or the other,” said Rep. Shri Thanedar, who represents a Detroit-area district. “There is already some discontent among Muslim Americans. There is some dissatisfaction among African American voters. So that’s very critical.”
“The more voters learn about RFK Jr., the less likely they are to support him,” Ms. Smith said.
Mr. Hughes noted that it was the Democrats who “used financial and legal means to prevent candidates from getting on the ballot.”
“We are confident we can win voter support no matter who is on the ballot,” he said.
Opinion polls are mixed about how Mr. Kennedy might transform the race.
A series of Fox News polls in swing states found that his inclusion — along with that of other third-party candidates — sometimes helped Mr. Trump, sometimes helped Mr. Biden and sometimes helped neither.
The Fox News poll in Michigan showed Mr. Kennedy at 9 percent, Mr. Trump leading at 42 percent and Mr. Biden at 40 percent. Two other third-party candidates, independent Cornel West and Jill Stein of the Greens, were at 2 percent. In a neck-and-neck race with Mr. Biden in the state, Mr. Trump led 49 percent to 46 percent.
Even the question of how to measure Mr. Kennedy’s popularity has been the subject of heated debate as pollsters try to find ways to neither exaggerate nor underestimate his support, with different methods yielding different results.
Michigan is the first battleground where Mr. Kennedy voted, and the state is expected to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2024 after recent razor-thin contests. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by just 10,704 votes. Mr Biden pushed him back into the Democratic column in 2020 by around 154,000 votes.
It is also the state that has exposed some of the deepest divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel, Hamas, the invasion of Gaza and Mr Biden’s handling of the conflict.
In Michigan’s Democratic primary, a protest movement urging voters to cast their ballot for “non-binding” received 13 percent of the vote, enough to win two delegates to the party’s national convention. The movement drew support from younger voters, progressives and the state’s influential Arab-American and Muslim populations, which are particularly large in Dearborn.
In interviews during the primary, many of those voters said they planned to sit out the election or vote for a third-party candidate rather than for Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden.
But Mr. Kennedy may not be the ideal candidate to take advantage of these disaffected Democrats.
He has taken a more aggressive pro-Israel position that, if widely publicized, could make it difficult for him to stoke anti-Biden sentiment in Arab American communities. In an interview in late 2023, Mr. Kennedy said that “the Palestinian people are arguably the people most pampered by international aid agencies,” and he recently described Israel as “a moral nation.”
“RFK is someone who, quite frankly, is not welcome in Michigan,” said Abbas Alawieh, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill who led the state’s “Listen to Michigan” protest initiative. “His campaign is a vanity project. He is not a friend of our movement.”
In a recent Wall Street Journal poll of battleground states, Mr. Trump was three percentage points ahead in a neck-and-neck race with Mr. Biden in Michigan, and two points ahead when Mr. Kennedy was included in the poll.
“Third parties can always go either way, and RFK is good for a lot of voters,” said Stu Sandler, a Republican strategist who has done extensive work in Michigan. “At the moment it certainly appears that this will help Trump. There are a lot of dissatisfied Biden voters, especially when you look at areas like Dearborn, about Biden’s support of Israel.”
Rep. Haley Stevens, a Democrat from Michigan, said the Biden campaign should remain focused on Mr. Trump and suggested that attempts to attack Mr. Kennedy could give his campaign a boost.
But she also said Democrats can’t “completely ignore” him either.
“I’m curious to see if he’ll open an office in Michigan and if he’s raised enough money to be able to sell a campaign in Michigan,” Ms. Stevens said. “And to be honest, it’s unclear who he’ll actually choose.”
The Kennedy campaign is currently focused on getting to the polls in additional states.
Last month, he named Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer and wealthy ex-wife of one of Google’s co-founders, as his vice president. She quickly poured $2 million into the campaign, intended to help Mr. Kennedy with the costly and arduous task of getting on the national ballot.
Source link
2024-04-19 21:26:16
www.nytimes.com
