It’s the vaccines
Trump has downplayed his role in the vaccines ever since that incident even though he is dying to take credit for them. He impulsively waded into this again after the State of the Union address and it didn’t go well at all:
All hell broke loose:
It went on and on and on. There is obviously a group of anti-vax MAGAs who feel so strongly about this they are even willing to defy Dear Leader.
Aaron Blake at the Washington Post reports on a new poll about this question:
A Monmouth University poll Monday initially asked voters whether they would consider voting for Kennedy. Democrats were slightly more likely than Republicans to say they were.
But then the poll asked people whether they were aware that Kennedy “claims that autism is linked to vaccines” and that he has floated a theory that covid was targeted at certain races. (Neither claim is based in fact.) About half of Republicans said they were aware of this; about 6 in 10 Democrats said they were.
Then it asked again whether people, with this knowledge, would consider voting for him.Suddenly, the percentage of Republicans who said they would consider Kennedy rose by eight percentage points, nearly doubling to just shy of 1 in 5.
The percentage of Democrats who support him drops seven points to 1 in 10.
We haven’t seen many polls on this issue and it’s hard to know if this will make any difference. But I suspect that Trump’s campaign has polled it and they don’t like what they’re seeing. Trump’s been hammering Kennedy over the past few days on his Truth Social page:
If you can make sense out of that more power to you. But it’s clear that he’s agitated about RFK Jr. But he really needs to have a chat with Steve Bannon and top GOP donors who have been pushing this campaign from the beginning. They created RFK Jr. Now they have to live with him.
I honestly don’t know who Kennedy benefits or hurts in this thing. He’s a nut and he has high name recognition but I have to assume that the family coming out against his candidacy will erode any “Kennedy” nostalgia and his policies will become more salient. On the anti-Biden side is his environmental record which is laudable. But Biden has been excellent on that subject so it’s not one of his vulnerabilities. On the anti-Trump side it’s Kennedy’s anti-vax crusade — which has been the greater part of his career in recent years. There’s something for everyone to hate in RFK Jr.