Americana

Who is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s presidential campaign for?

THE NEWS

BOSTON – The signs and banners displayed the last name only: Kennedy. A fanfare overture that evoked “Camelot” played through a sound system. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. walked onstage, the hundreds gathered to see him chanted “Bobby,” a reference to his father, and the 1968 campaign ended by an assassin’s bullet.

But no Kennedy had run for president like this. Over one hour and forty-eight minutes — “this is what happens when you censor someone for 18 years,” he joked — Kennedy attacked “corporate feudalism,” denounced the “economic cataclysm” of COVID stay-at-home orders, questioned why so many children were being diagnosed with autism, and worried that America was risking a “nuclear exchange” over Ukraine.

The median Democratic voter, who got vaccinated against COVID and supports every sort of aid for Ukraine, wasn’t looking for a candidate like this. The people who’d shown up for Kennedy couldn’t imagine a better one.

“We were taught, growing up, that we had certain liberties as Americans, and they’re being stripped away from us,” said Cheryl Wooden, who said she hadn’t voted for any candidate in years, but pinned a Kennedy ’24 button to her Columbia fleece. “It’s all about control.”

Democrats seeking a stronger challenge to Biden weren’t impressed. Chris Liquori, the New Hampshire coordinator for Don’t Run Joe, said that he’d expected more alternatives to emerge by now, reflecting Democratic discomfort with Biden’s age and record. Yet just days before Biden was expected to launch his re-election campaign, the alternatives were author Marianne Williamson, and Kennedy.

“He’s crazy. He’s anti-science. His whole charade on vaccines is deeply concerning,” Liquori explained. If there was an upside, he said, it would be watching the Democratic Party “sabotage a Kennedy” for a change.

DAVID’S VIEW

It’s the great paradox of 2024: Most Democrats say they want an alternative to Biden, but no alternative they’re happy with wants to run.

Party operatives I talked to this week considered Kennedy a non-factor, and assumed that most support for his challenge — 14%, in a poll released the day he announced — was down to name recognition, from Democrats who missed the Kennedys but hadn’t followed this one too closely.

“Is Biden going to be advised to just ignore him?” asked David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk poll that found one in seven of the president’s 2020 supporters now considering Kennedy. “That’s possible, but what if Kennedy gets 30% in an early state?”

Biden’s age does, on paper, make him vulnerable; so does progressive disappointment with some unfulfilled campaign promises and decisions like the move to stop a railroad worker strike.

But the Kennedy challenge isn’t about a well-known environmental advocate, who at one point was floated as a possible EPA director for the Obama administration, running at Biden from the left. In 2005, Kennedy began arguing that “government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma” to approve dangerous vaccines that might have been responsible for the rise in autism diagnoses.

That got a friendly hearing from liberal media outlets at the time. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Jon Stewart told Kennedy when he joined him for an interview on The Daily Show. But as the data continued to back up vaccine safety and “trust the science” became a Democratic mantra, that view fell out of favor among Democrats. By the time he joined other vaccine skeptics at a D.C. rally against vaccine mandates in 2022, mistrust of government health agencies was an overwhelmingly conservative issue.

In Boston, Kennedy was joined by vanishingly few Democrats, including just two of his siblings — and not the ones who’d run for office. The most prominent guests at the Park Plaza hotel were vaccine skeptics, including Steve Kirsch, the founder of a COVID early treatment fund who cut ties with it over his criticism of vaccines; Del Bigtree, the founder of an anti-vaccine mandate group and host of the skeptical web news show The HighWire; and Robert Malone, a vaccine scientist who’s perhaps best known for telling Joe Rogan that only “mass-formation psychosis” explained why so many Americans trusted the government’s COVID response.

“The government lies to us, we all know it,” Kennedy told the crowd. “The media lies to us.”

Kennedy’s speech only dealt with the vaccine issue obliquely. He promised to end “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” and the crisis of “chronic disease.” Then he asked why autism diagnoses had surged after 1989, alluding to a theory linking the condition to vaccines fueled by a long discredited study that was later withdrawn by the health journal Lancet and contradicted by subsequent research.

“I have never seen somebody my age with full-blown autism — I mean, stimming, head-banging, non-verbal, non-toilet trained,” Kennedy said.

That’s not a conversation Democrats are eager to elevate in a primary, and the White House has had absolutely nothing to say about Kennedy. The new candidate spent less time criticizing Biden on Wednesday than he spent criticizing Donald Trump, for ignoring the people who’d “begged him not to do the lockdowns” after COVID reached America. Kennedy wanted in on the national conversation that social media censorship had denied him. That was clear, if his path to the nomination wasn’t.

THE VIEW FROM MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

“Democracy is a good thing, and anyone should join the race who feels they have something to contribute,” Williamson told Semafor. “There are issues where Bobby and I agree, and issues where we do not agree. I look forward to what I hope will be an exciting and respectful primary campaign.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

At least some pundits think Kennedy’s message, and not his name, may explain his surprising early showing in the polls. “Madman he may be, but RFK Jr is trying to revive a progressivism that isn’t just the scowling face of corporate and government power,” tweeted Michael Brendan Dougherty of the conservative National Review. “I’m not surprised he’s already at 14 percent.”

NOTABLE

• Protest candidates, even with limited name recognition, can sometimes have surprise showings in a sleepy primary with an incumbent on the ballot. In 2012, a prison inmate named Keith Russell Judd won more than 40% of the vote against then-President Barack Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic primary. “Simply put, West Virginia does not like Obama,” The Washington Post’s Rachel Weiner wrote in a piece explaining Judd’s performance. Many of the party’s ancestral Democratic voters were trending Republican by then and were also upset with Obama’s policy towards coal.
• Looking back on the Kennedy legacy, Texas politics reporter Christopher Hooks described this week’s campaign announcement as history repeating “first as tragedy, then as tragedy, then as tragedy, then as tragedy, then as tragedy, then as tragedy, then as farce.”

MONTANA

Republicans refused to let Helena’s only transgender lawmaker address the floor on Thursday, after Rep. Zooey Zephyr accused supporters of a ban on gender-affirming care for minors of having “blood on your hands.” Members of the state’s Freedom Caucus called for Zephyr to be censured, using male pronouns to refer to the Democrat, who identifies as a woman. The censure didn’t move this week, but the GOP speaker of the House said he’d refuse to give the floor to a member who couldn’t “maintain decorum.”

A surge in support from self-identified conservatives has restored Donald Trump’s lead over Ron DeSantis everywhere. Trump hasn’t been this strong against the field in New Hampshire since 2021, and half of the voters who said DeSantis was their first choice three months ago have drifted away. But they haven’t all drifted to Trump. Two-thirds of Republicans say they want DeSantis to run, compared to 51% who want Trump to run again. Just 15% of primary voters view DeSantis negatively, compared to 28% for Trump.

The challenge facing DeSantis is even clearer here: Most Republican voters think that his record is less impressive than Trump’s. Asked which candidate is a “strong leader,” they break for Trump by 32 points; asked who stands up for what he believes, they pick Trump by a 2-1 margin. DeSantis leads Trump by 20 points on the question of which candidate has a better “temperament,” and by 10 points on electability. The problem for DeSantis – and Nikki Haley, who’s argued directly that she’s more electable than Trump – is that Republican voters don’t prioritize that, and don’t trust polling on Trump after 2016.

Landry for Governor, “Enough is Enough With Violent Crime.” When Louisiana’s GOP attorney general endorsed legislation to share more court information with the public, he was also shooting his first ad in the race for governor. What started as a bill that the GOP supermajority in Baton Rouge could pass is now a campaign promise to make Louisianans aware “when [district attorneys] fail to prosecute, when judges fail to act, when police are handcuffed instead of the criminals.”

Bluegrass Freedom Action, “False Attacks.” The air war in Kentucky’s GOP gubernatorial primary has been dominated by former U.N. Ambassador Kelly Craft, and by PACs trying to bring down Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron. This pro-Cameron PAC hits Craft with stories broken by Politico and the Louisville Courier-Journal; her occasional absences as America’s ambassador to Canada, and criticism over an ad that falsely suggested that she’d lost a family member to opioid addiction.

One Nation, “Costing WV Jobs.” The moment Joe Manchin got behind the Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans started using it against him. This 501(c)4 uses some inventive math to suggest that the law will cost West Virginians “100,000 jobs,” briefly citing two reports — one from West Virginia University, counting nearly 12,000 coal industry jobs in the state, and one from the American Petroleum Institute, counting around 82,000 jobs tied to the gas and petroleum industries. The idea here is that clean energy credits will wipe all of that out, and fast.

WHITE HOUSE

President Joe Biden is expected to start his re-election campaign next week, after a few delays. While the Republican side of the race has been encouraging to Democrats, an IRS special agent claimed this week that credible tax charges against the president’s son Hunter were being slow-walked.

Larry Elder, the conservative talk radio host who lost a bid for governor in California’s 2021 recall election, announced his own bid on Thursday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Elder was already scheduled to speak in Iowa this week, at a Saturday conference hosted by the state chapter of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

“I feel I have a moral, religious, and a patriotic duty to give back to a country that’s been so good to my family and to me,” Elder told Carlson. He’d never sought office before the recall campaign, raising $18 million in a matter of months, but losing as Democrats turned the race into a referendum on Elder’s conservatism. (Elder won 48% of the vote, but 62% of Californians voted to reject the recall.)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Who isn’t running to replace Rep. David Cicilline? The Democrat’s surprise retirement announcement kicked off the year’s first special House election, with a primary on September 5. Fourteen Democrats have already filed to run, and Aaron Regunberg, a 33-year old former state legislator who nearly defeated now-Gov. Dan McKee in a 2018 primary, is angling to be the progressive choice.

What’s that mean in 2023? What can the Democratic Party’s left pull off when the path to its full agenda — Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal — is closed off? We talked about it.

Americana: Why are you in this race?

Aaron Regunberg: We need more strong progressive leaders in Congress. The world is on fire right now. There’s an urgency to the issues that we’re dealing with, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s corporate consolidation, whether it’s Republican attacks on everything that we care about. So I think we need leaders with a record of being able to organize, build coalitions, and bring real change. And I’ve done that, whether it was passing paid sick days, increasing the minimum wage, solitary confinement reform, or new green energy programs.

I think we’re going to be running on the boldest progressive platform in this race, whether that’s Medicare-for-All — and I worked on universal health care and single payer at the state level, every year I was in the General Assembly — or whether that’s the bold, ambitious climate action that we actually need. The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] did some really important work on the demand side, but to actually lower emissions we need to deal with the supply side.

Americana: What can a progressive member of Congress do right now, with this arrangement of power? Maybe Democrats win the House back in 2024, but the idea of electing President Bernie Sanders and breaking the filibuster to pass Medicare-for-All or the Green New Deal — that’s not happening.

Aaron Regunberg: One, there’s the platform a congressional seat offers, and the tools it provides. David Cicilline’s done a great job with that — look at his work on the Judiciary Committee, building an anti-monopoly narrative and agenda. Two, there’s a lot to prepare for when Democrats win back the majority, which we will, because Republicans aren’t offering anything to working people right now. So much got stripped out of Build Back Better, policies that would have had a huge impact for people, and we can work on that.

In the state House, I brought my colleagues together around a collective agenda; we called it the “fair shot agenda.” It takes 25 votes to block a budget, so leadership is very attuned to that number. We’d get more than that number of folks behind the podium to say ‘this is our collective agenda, we need these things to happen, or this isn’t passing.’ That’s the organizing experience I’d bring to this job.

Americana: What’s the path to universal health care under these conditions? It’s not passing one big bill.

Aaron Regunberg: The fight to lower the Medicare eligibility age seems to me like the best mechanism to start that.

Americana: Lower it to what?

Aaron Regunberg: As low as it’s politically feasible. If we can build a coalition capable of making that happen, then we need to do it. If it can’t cover everyone, and the lower eligibility age is something like 50, then we need to do that.

Americana: How does the conservative Supreme Court, and the conservative district courts that keep ruling against progressive bills and executive orders, factor into this? You’ve got the abortion medication example, but I could bring up student debt forgiveness, too.

Aaron Regunberg: We shouldn’t fail to pass important policies because a crazy, activist, right-wing judge is going to strike it down. We should do it, then actually push back. It’s about getting the Democratic Party to be united and willing to actually call that kind of right-wing legislating from the bench. If we can’t criticize the judiciary, even when they’re acting so far beyond the rule of law — that’s a joke.

People remember FDR’s fight against the Supreme Court as a fight that he lost, because his court-packing proposal didn’t happen. But I think any objective historical analysis of that era shows that he won that fight. The courts were striking down the first New Deal, and he went after them in an aggressive way. When they struck down a popular policy, he made that connection publicly to everyday voters. That was enough to scare the courts back into a more appropriate role.

• 11 days until local elections in Texas
• 25 days until primaries in Kentucky and Philadelphia
• 140 days until the special congressional election in Rhode Island
• 198 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
• 564 days until the 2024 presidential election

If you’re enjoying Semafor Americana and finding it useful, please share with your family, friends and colleagues.

To assure this email doesn’t go to your junk folder, add americana@semafor.com to your contacts. In Gmail you should drag this newsletter over to your ‘Primary’ tab.

Also please send feedback! We want to hear from you.

— Dave