When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was roaming New Hampshire earlier this year, Donald Trump’s campaign saw him as “pure upside,” as one source close to the campaign put it.
Running to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, Kennedy has made dystopian and conspiratorial critiques of the administration that disguise misinformation as populism in a way Trump could never pull off—at least under the right circumstances.
Since launching his campaign in April, Kennedy has accused the Biden administration of denying him Secret Service protection in an unprecedented fashion, implying it was for political reasons, by falsely claiming he was the first candidate since the assassination of his father in 1968 not to receive it by this stage of the primary.
He’s also gone after Biden on the vaccine rollout in ways Trump couldn’t—given that his own White House launched Project Warp Speed to fast track the jabs—accusing the president of being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry and calling his fellow Democrat “their president.”
Now that he is moving to run as an independent in the 2024 general election, putting him in direct competition with Trump for similarly inclined voters, Kennedy’s days of evading MAGA wrath may be numbered.
“If he wants to run, run. Fine,” the source close to the Trump campaign told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive issue. “But if he chooses to run as an independent, then he’s our opponent.”
And while Trump has thus far welcomed Kennedy into the mix, an independent run would likely warrant some Trump-sized attacks that could finally undermine Kennedy’s appeal with the anti-vaccine-curious voters fueling his campaign.
If Kennedy can get on the ballot in key electoral college states—where recent elections have been decided by just a few thousand votes—he could potentially attract enough of those anti-vaccine and conspiracy-believing voters to meaningfully impact the outcome.
Trumpworld is already sharpening their attacks in preparation to ensure Kennedy would remain a spoiler for Biden—and not for Trump.
“He’s not this centrist that he portrays himself to be,” the Trumpworld source continued, previewing how they might undercut Kennedy. “He’s a hardline Democrat on a bunch of major issues that run against the Republican Party and specifically MAGA Republicans.”
The Kennedy campaign did not return requests for comment for this story.
Kennedy, an avowed anti-vaxxer who still insists he isn’t one, is “cashing in his old reputation for his new one,” a senior New Hampshire Democrat told The Daily Beast. Although the longtime presidential primary organizer and adviser praised Kennedy as an experienced champion for the environment, they remained befuddled by his transformation into a modern pied piper of conspiracy theorists.
While there would have been little runway left for Kennedy to keep the donations rolling in and his name in the news once the Democratic primary got underway in earnest next year, an independent run in the general election allows him to remain relevant all the way through November 2024.
There’s little public polling on Kennedy voters and their second choices, which would give a clearer sense of whether he’d hurt Biden or Trump more as an independent. But Kennedy himself seems to think the question isn’t complicated. In a recent podcast interview with comedian Theo Von, Kennedy flatly declared, “I take more votes from President Trump than I do from President Biden.”
A FiveThirtyEight analysis from August found that Kennedy does appeal more to Republicans than those in his own party by a wide margin, with his approval rating among Republicans consistently in 20 to 30 points positive territory. Meanwhile, Democrats tend to have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of him in primary polls thus far.
“RFK Jr. appeals to crazies, and particularly Trump crazies,” a former Democratic presidential campaign adviser told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about the things some Democrats won’t say out loud about the controversial heir to one of America’s major political dynasties.
“Genuinely rational voters, even those who don’t love Biden, are not interested in injecting bleach into their veins,” the Democrat added, alluding to Trump’s infamous COVID press conference where he talked about wanting to “hit the body” with “very powerful light" and “disinfectant” by injection.
Although Kennedy appeared to benefit from high name identification early in the primary and polled at or just above 15 percent for most of the summer, he dipped slightly in the polls toward the end of August and beginning of September, recently climbing back to his ceiling of 15 percent.
Before Kennedy sparked chatter over an independent run, the arc of his campaign appeared to have a pretty clear end point.
On Jan. 23, 2024, Kennedy might have expected to get an entire news cycle to himself. Normally, Democrats and Republicans would vote on that night in the New Hampshire primary, but not this year.
With Democrats anointing South Carolina as their new first-in-the-nation primary, the party’s official New Hampshire primary isn’t until Feb. 6, the same day as Nevada. But in protest of the new rules, New Hampshire Democrats are pushing forward with an unsanctioned primary that carries no formal weight in the nominating process.
Kennedy has focused his campaigning within the state. Along with his place in New England political royalty, that focus was thought to give him a shot to pick up a significant chunk of votes in an unrecognized primary—one in which, theoretically, Biden would not appear on the ballot.
Were it not for the new rogue primary, the senior New Hampshire Democrat argued, Kennedy wouldn’t be relevant at all this cycle.
“The only reason why he would even have a shot at New Hampshire in the first place is because of the whole hullabaloo around” the first-in-the-nation primary going to South Carolina instead, the senior New Hampshire Democrat said.
Notably, Trump isn’t the only candidate with which Kennedy shares some commonalities.
There’s an unusual overlap in donors and high profile supporters for both Kennedy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as Axios reported in July. Aside from Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric, he is also opposed to sending further military aid to Ukraine, another point of agreement among some DeSantis supporters and a large swath of the GOP base.
If Kennedy stretched out his low budget campaign to November 2024, even a few thousand votes going his way could make enough of a difference in key battlegrounds if the big money centrist group No Labels also puts up a third party candidate—and that’s not even mentioning Cornel West, who’s mounting his own third party run from Biden’s left.
Third party candidates, in part, helped Trump around the margins in 2016 to achieve his narrow victory of just 79,646 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that tipped the electoral college in his favor.
In all three of those states, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein secured enough votes combined to exceed the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost.
Kennedy’s comments about taking support from Trump, then, did not go unnoticed in Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, according to the Trumpworld source.
“A lot of right wingers wanted to highlight some of the good statements that RFK made criticizing Biden, but there’s also a lot of material there that right wingers don’t know,” the Republican said, citing Kennedy’s support for survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting in Florida and his stance on climate change as a major no-go for any true MAGA supporters.
Yet so far, the Trump campaign isn’t sweating Kennedy too much. While there is a lingering suspicion that he might receive support from bitter DeSantis supporters, the Trump campaign smells a grift more than anything else.
“I don’t think he’s as much of a threat to Trump as he claims to be,” the source close to Trump said, referencing Kenney’s remarks on the Theo Von podcast. “I think he’s saying that to stay relevant and keep bringing in money.”