The Scoop
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the star of a new $250,000 ad buy from the conservative group CatholicVote, directed at Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, with a planned expansion to other states.
In the television spot, first provided to Semafor, the third party candidate-turned-Trump surrogate talks about his own faith, then says he’s supporting the Republican nominee because he’ll “take bold action on the economy, on the border, and on restoring children’s health.” He criticizes the Democratic Party, but not Kamala Harris by name — and he doesn’t mention abortion, LGBTQ issues, or debates over religious exemptions for health care providers, all of which have been discussed by Republicans on the trail recently.
“Catholics disagree on many issues, but we must find a way to love our children more than we hate each other,” Kennedy says.
CatholicVote President Brian Burch told Semafor that he’d been in contact with Kennedy for months, before and after the Trump endorsement, talking through their positions on abortion. Kennedy, he said, agreed that “we need to be spending an equal amount of money on helping women choose to keep their child as we are on helping them to get abortions.”
Kennedy remained conflicted on the “bodily autonomy” issues around abortion; those issues were integral to his career-changing stance against mandatory vaccinations. But he was sold on the idea of helping Trump appeal to Catholics in swing states.
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David’s view
Republicans have been portraying the Harris campaign and Democratic Party as anti-Christian and anti-Catholic all year, and stepped up that criticism after Harris sent a video to the Al Smith dinner, instead of attending in person. (Kennedy and his wife Cheryl Hines did attend.) Kennedy has been campaigning for Trump, often alongside Democrat-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard, with the sort of frustrated anti-establishment voters who were attracted to his own presidential campaign. His appeal has not typically centered on faith issues.
But this is the first TV ad, with money behind it, in which Kennedy makes the case for Trump. The lack of any abortion line in the 60-second ad is notable — polling has found that issue helping Democrats, even among self-identified Catholics. The messaging is more subtle, leaning on more than 60 years of warm feelings toward the Kennedys from Democratic Catholics.
Notable
- Trump’s running mate JD Vance, a Catholic convert, published an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today that calls the Biden-Harris team the “most anti-Catholic administration in living memory.” He’s gotten some local criticism not for the op-ed itself, but for publishing it in a newspaper in a long-running union dispute with its reporters.
- Kamala Harris talked about her own Christian faith at her CNN town hall on Wednesday night, including her conversations with her pastor during the campaign. “I do pray every day, sometimes twice a day,” she said.