Could Robert Kennedy Jr. Be a Game Changer?

Robert’s son and John Fitzgerald’s nephew is leaving the party of his famous family to run as an independent. His rhetoric is not just all about being anti-vaccine and he might appeal to the right as well as the left.

On Oct. 9, nearly six months after launching his candidacy for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Robert Kennedy Jr. is expected to announce that he will instead run as an independent in the general election. Assuming this announcement takes place, and his candidacy goes the distance in November 2024, it warrants a closer look.*

We can look at Kennedy in two simple ways. First, by his famous name and distinctive voice, marked by a genetic illness called spasmodic dysphonia that affects the voice muscles in the larynx. Second, as a caricature of someone who opposes vaccines or a conspiracy theorist who dabbles in disinformation.

It must be said that many of Kennedy’s controversial remarks have fueled this less than favorable image. For example, last year, favorably invoking Adolf Hitler, he compared citizen mobility under the Nazi regime to citizen mobility under contemporary governments that restricted how people moved around if they were not vaccinated against COVID-19. Apparently underestimating the number of Jews who were killed, he notably claimed that it was possible at the time for people to escape from Germany. This kind of disturbing rhetoric earned him a spot deep in the background of the Democratic Party, which opposed any debate between him and President Joe Biden. An incumbent president has never had to debate an opponent from his own party, and Kennedy was certainly not going to be the first to get the honor.

But today, polling at an average of about 15% months before the Democratic primaries begin, Kennedy could slam the door on the party tied to his family name since the middle of the last century.

Because the candidate has embraced certain positions that are closer to those of Donald Trump than of the Democratic Party — among others, regarding the Mexican American border, it is reasonable to believe that his presence on the ballot as an independent is more likely to erode a greater share of the former Republican president’s votes than Biden being on the ballot. It is all the more likely that those viscerally opposed to Trump will still vote for Biden since Kennedy has taken the same anti-establishment tone as the popular former Republican president.

That said, anyone who takes the time to look beyond a simplistic portrait of Kennedy and listen to everything he is saying will find matters outside the left-right axis and reductive categorizations.

First, he attacks America’s sacred cows head-on perhaps unlike any other major candidate before him, with the possible exception of Trump. But, unlike Trump, he usually does so more eloquently and with more intelligence, with a perspective more anchored in the traditional left.

For example, Kennedy is challenging U.S. military and financial aid to Ukraine, lamenting that the money destined for weapons is not being invested in social programs for the poorest Americans. He condemns neoconservative political architects like American diplomat Victoria Nuland and political scientist Robert Kagan, who shaped the interventionist foreign policies of the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden presidencies, and did so while invoking his uncle and father’s calls for peace during the 1960s.

Kennedy questions the most socially harmful decisions made by certain public authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, notably the prolonged closure of schools in many parts of the country, while criticizing Trump, who was head of the U.S. government when those decisions were made, as well as the teachers’ unions that often fought against reopening educational institutions.

And when it comes to vaccines, Kennedy goes much further than COVID-19, taking digs at particularly powerful actors. The Democratic Party, he claims, yielded to the pharmaceutical industry more than a decade ago with the passage of Obama’s signature health care law known as “Obamacare.”

In order to pass Obamacare, the Democrats needed the political support of pharmaceutical companies to secure congressional support. The Democrats also felt the need to compete financially with the Republicans, who gladly accepted financial contributions from practically any industry. The Democrats opened the door wide to the influence of “Big Pharma” and moved to silence their critics.

Kennedy also highlights social inequalities in the U.S., comparing the abject misery he personally witnessed in certain communities in Pennsylvania to that in Latin America during the 1980s when he traveled there as an environmental activist. The rage in Pennsylvania is as ubiquitous as pro-Trump signs.

Kennedy again quotes John F. Kennedy as he talks about foreign regimes during the Cold War when super-rich oligarchs maintained power on the backs of the masses. “You cannot continue to keep so many people in poverty before they revolt. And when they revolt, it will be the Communists who seize upon their anger and take power.”**

Kennedy’s most fundamental message, perhaps, is that the current system is untenable. Sooner or later, change will come, propelled either by cynicism and demagoguery or by idealism and empathy. In this scenario, Trump represents the former, and he the latter.

Objectively, it is a message that could appeal to a sizeable number of Americans. In fact, ahead of Kennedy’s presumed announcement of his independent candidacy, the polling firm Echelon measured his support in a hypothetical three-way contest against Trump and Biden. With one exception, Kennedy has more support among voters than any other independent candidate in the firm’s history.

Are these voters more to the left or the right? Are they Democrats or Republicans? More than anything, they are frustrated. And there are many of them on both sides.

*Editor’s Note: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential candidacy as an independent Oct. 9, 2023.

**Editor’s Note: This quote, though accurately translated, could not be independently verified.