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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said Sunday that he’d be open to seeking the Democratic nomination if “party elders” urged him to, at a press conference where he began to label Vice President Kamala Harris, not President Biden, as the race’s status quo candidate.
“I’m the only presidential candidate who can beat Donald Trump,” he told reporters outside the Kennedy family’s Massachussetts compound. “If I were them, I would do that.”
The transition wasn’t instant, and Kennedy repeatedly referred to a choice between Trump and Biden that no longer existed. Nine months after he quit the Democratic Party primary, Kennedy said that Democrats had hurt their chances by making it hard to compete against Biden for the nomination. He denounced Harris as “one of the primary authors of the school-to-prison pipeline.” Democrats were getting behind her, he said, “because it’s the easiest way to hold onto the money.”
Kennedy attacked Trump, too — “his pick for vice president is a salute to the CIA” — but aimed most of his criticism at Democrats.
“I predicted that President Biden suffered from a degenerative condition that was not going to improve,” he said. “The reaction of the DNC to that obvious condition was to hide it from the American public.” Had he run, he surmised that he’d “be in the same position that Dean Phillips is today, or Marianne Williamson, which is sidelined.”
A lifelong Democrat, Kennedy entered the party’s primary in April 2023, but got little traction. By September, he was accusing the party of rigging the contest against him; in October, he ended his campaign and announced that he was running outside the major parties.
Kennedy started a new party, We the People, to ease his way onto as many state ballots as possible. He also won the ballot lines of the Natural Law Party in Michigan and the American Independent Party in California, and flirted with the Libertarian Party, eventually allowing supporters to nominate him at its Memorial Day convention.
He lost handily, but some state Libertarian Parties embraced Kennedy anyway, over LP nominee Chase Oliver. On Friday, Kennedy formed a joint fundraising committee with the Libertarian National Committee; party chair Angela McArdle explained that Kennedy would help “open up additional fundraising opportunities” while, officially, Libertarians campaigned for Oliver.
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David’s view
Kennedy’s criticism of his old party might draw attention to the DNC’s Rube Goldberg process. The party is currently planning, still, to pick a nominee with a virtual vote before the convention starts on Aug. 19. The Biden campaign’s quick transformation into a Harris campaign may preempt the “open convention” that some pundits and donors were calling for, and obviously won’t help Kennedy.
But Kennedy quit the primary when he was polling in the low teens against Biden, and his appeal to Democrats — that they would win if they let him be the nominee — was rote. The pledged delegates who’ll pick the nominee were overwhelmingly elected to support Biden, and many have already followed him to Harris.
Kennedy is also far less popular with rank and file Democrats than he was last year. His campaign has emphasized positions most Democrats oppose — ending support for Ukraine’s war, pausing NIH research on vaccines — and his media hits have been overwhelmingly on conservative or anti-liberal outlets. He polls best with young voters and non-white voters, and we’ll learn soon how much of those voters’ angst was about Biden’s policies, and not his advanced age.
Notable
- Are any big name Democrats going to run against Harris? As Benjy Sarlin and I write, the raft of early endorsements for her since Biden dropped out may scare off some of the most-discussed names.
Correction
An earlier version of this story described Kennedy’s family compound as in a different state.