You read it right, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is launching a 2024 presidential bid with an aim to primary President Joe Biden and unseat him from the White House.
Among the small handful of Democrats who have announced a challenge to Biden in 2024, Kennedy is currently pulling in the most support according to a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches his unlikely bid for the Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday with the support of 14% of voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020, an exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds.
That is surprising strength for a candidate who has a famous political name but is now known mostly as the champion of a debunked conspiracy theory blaming childhood vaccines for autism.
In the survey, taken Saturday through Tuesday, only 67% of Biden’s 2020 supporters said they would support him for the Democratic nomination over his current challengers. Kennedy stands at 14%, and self-help author Marianne Williamson, a quixotic candidate for the nomination last time, is at 5%. Another 13% are undecided.
Within his party, Kennedy was among the few who challenged mandated Covid-19 vaccinations and was often pilloried for not toeing the line:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy, now 69, built a following on social media as he opposed vaccine mandates as a violation of individual liberty, at times invoking the Holocaust in comparison, and spread misinformation about the safety of the vaccine.
The USA TODAY story uses the word “misinformation” to describe the things Kennedy said regarding the Covid-19 vaccine but one has to wonder how much of that “misinformation” at the time was merely information you weren’t allowed to say.
Perhaps the biggest black eye for Kennedy running as a Democrat was his prior support from former President Donald Trump:
His views have sometimes aligned him with former president Donald Trump and his supporters. In 2017, Trump asked Kennedy to chair a presidential commission on vaccine safety.
Unfurtnuealy, for RFK Jr., he won’t be getting the backing of his family in his endeavor to upend Biden’s second-term ambitions. When asked recently, some family members reiterated their support for the current president:
“Which brother?” Chris Kennedy, who was a former candidate in the Illinois governor’s race, responded when asked by CNN what he thought of his brother’s bid for the White House.
“This is a difficult situation for me. I love my older brother Bobby. He has extraordinary charisma and is a very gifted speaker,” Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of Robert F. Kennedy, said to CNN. “I admire his past work as an environmentalist – because of him, we can swim in the Hudson. But due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.”
Even RFK Jr. himself stated that he personally admires Joe Biden and finds the decision difficult to launch a presidential bid:
“It has been my difficult choice to put my principles ahead of my personal affections for the President which remain undiminished. Some members of my family agree with me and others do not. I bear them no ill will. Families can disagree and still love each other. We hold that possibility for the entire country too,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement to CNN.
All-in-all, this is an amusing sideshow right now since none of the early Biden challengers, whether it’s Kennedy or Marianne Williamson, have a serious chance of becoming the 2024 Democratic nominee.
If President Biden does not run for re-election, there are plenty of other broadly-acceptable names in the running that most rank-and-file Democratic primary voters would support instead.
