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RFK Jr goes independent

Published by digby on September 30, 2023

Of course. You knew that.

Environmental lawyer and 2024 presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday teased a “major announcement” in upcoming weeks amid speculation he is considering dropping his bid to primary President Joe Biden as a Democrat and instead running for president as an independent or on a third-party ticket.

“I want to tell you now what I’ve come to understand after six months of campaigning: There is a path to victory,” Kennedy said in a video announcing an October 9 event in Philadelphia. “We all recognize that there’s a genuine possibility of national transformation and its source is the goodness in the American people.”

News of the upcoming event, first reported by Mediaite, comes as the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s presidential bid has conducted national polling to gauge his viability in a hypothetical three-person race against Biden and former President Donald Trump, a person familiar with the polling told CNN.

In the two-minute video announcing the event – which was shared with CNN in response to questions about the possibility of Kennedy running as an independent – the presidential candidate criticized corruption in government and on both sides of the aisle. He also called out the “established Washington interests” and said his campaign will “change the habits of American politics.”

“I understand that deeply felt concern that people have about the way corruption has overtaken our government. It’s in the executive branch. It’s in Congress. It’s in the leadership of both political parties,” he added.

In July, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, met Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle at an event in Tennessee. They discussed their shared beliefs, including around vaccine mandates and pandemic-era shutdowns, and the two have been in touch since, McArdle told CNN Friday. She said she has not received a commitment from Kennedy to run as a Libertarian Party candidate.

This might not be as bad as Demcrats think:

The American right’s efforts to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were as transparent as they were cynical. The idea, as advanced by Stephen K. Bannon and the like, was clearly to try to embarrass President Biden in the Democratic primary. So they used Kennedy’s inflated early poll standing as an excuse to treat the primary challenge from a fringe figure as something real and threatening.

Fox News picked up the ball and ran with it, publishing many dozens of stories and featuring him regularly on-air. House Republicans even invited him to testify on Capitol Hill.

It hasn’t worked. And now, it’s looking as if the whole thing could backfire.

The latest indications are that Kennedy will end his Democratic primary challenge against Biden and instead run in the general election. Mediaite reported Friday that he will declare an independent bid on Oct. 9, and Kennedy is now teasing a major announcement on that date, while saying and doing the kinds of things that suggest Mediaite’s report is accurate.

(Asked to comment on whether the report was true, Kennedy’s campaign merely responded with a link to a video previewing his Oct. 9 announcement.)

And while Kennedy is a lifelong Democrat from the country’s preeminent Democratic family, there is plenty of reason to believe that a third-party bid could hurt Donald Trump more than Biden.

There is no good polling that tests a Kennedy third-party bid. What we do know is that Republicans like Kennedy a heck of a lot more than Democrats do. That was true pretty shortly after he launched his campaign in April, and the gap has now grown into a chasm.

The latest polling from Quinnipiac University shows that Republicans like Kennedy by a 30-point margin, 48 percent favorable to 18 percent unfavorable.

Democrats, meanwhile, have developed an overwhelming distaste. The Quinnipiac poll shows just 14 percent have a favorable opinion of him, compared with 57 percent who have an unfavorable one.

The anti-vax faction doesn’t love Trump. And a whole bunch of QAnon people are so addled that they think JFK and JFK Jr are still alive so I could see them voting for Bobby Jr thinking it’s some kind of a sign.

The NY Times had this a couple of months ago:

Speaking at a festival hosted by a libertarian group in New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. railed against the “mainstream media” for serving as “propagandists for the powerful.” Each time he mentioned the perfidy of the press — for silencing dissent, for toeing the government line, for labeling him a conspiracy theorist — he drew a supportive hail of jeers.

It was a page out of the playbook of Donald J. Trump. But for Mr. Kennedy, who is running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, it was more than a rhetorical flourish.

Censorship is a central theme of his campaign, uniting an unlikely coalition that includes longtime acolytes in what is known as the “health freedom” movement; donors from Silicon Valley; and new admirers from across the political spectrum.

“The mainstream media that is here today is going to report that I, you know, have paranoid conspiracy theories, which is what they always say, but I’m just going to tell you facts,” Mr. Kennedy said at the event last week. He added, “When the press believes it is their job to protect you from dangerous information, they are manipulating you.”

Indeed, Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and scion of the storied Kennedy Democratic clan, is now a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has twisted facts about vaccine development by presenting information out of context; embraced unsubstantiated claims that some clouds are chemical agents being spread by the government; and promoted the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.

The idea that the press has a stranglehold on public information is a core, animating belief in the health freedom movement, which broadly opposes regulation of health practices, including vaccinations. Two political action committees supporting Mr. Kennedy were formed by people who knew him through this movement, which accounts for some of his most ardent support.

This whole thing is a Steve Bannon special by the way.

He’s just sure that the Kennedy name is going to draw millions of Democrats who don’t like Biden. He may have made a big mistake. Couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of fascists.

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