Well it happened.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is all but certain to dump the Democrats and run for president as an independent.
According to the New York Times:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hinted strongly on Friday that he would run for president on a third-party ticket instead of continuing his long-shot Democratic primary challenge to President Biden, a move that would set off alarms among Democrats worried about its potential to cause chaos in November 2024.
Mr. Kennedy, in a video released by his campaign, teased a “major announcement” in Philadelphia on Oct. 9, promising to speak about “a sea change in American politics” and dropping clues that he would be continuing his presidential campaign outside the Democratic Party.
“How are we going to win against the established Washington interests?” Mr. Kennedy says in the video. “It’s not through playing the game by the corrupt rules that the corrupt powers and the vested interests have rigged to keep us all in their thrall. Instead, we’re going to have to rewrite the assumptions and change the habits of American politics.”
“What I’ve come to understand after six months of campaigning: There is a path to victory,” he declares at another point, saying that the more he sees the inherent goodness of the American people, “the more the path to victory becomes visible.”
Which is Joe Biden's worst nightmare come true.
Democrats worry that a third-party candidate in a general election will pull votes away from Biden, who is facing low approval ratings, and help elect the eventual Republican nominee in 2024. The same concerns were expressed after Cornel West announced he would run as a Green Party candidate. And now the fears are growing as Biden remains neck-and-neck with the leading GOP contender, former President Donald Trump, in hypothetical matchups.
Kennedy is an appealing candidate for Democrats because of his refusal to go along with their suffocating narrative. Yes, he has some very leftist positions on things such as abortion, which makes him impossible for a conservative to vote for. But he's the man who has questioned the establishment's vaccine narrative regarding the COVID vaccine, and despite efforts to silence and ridicule him, was right all along -- and courageous to boot. He believes in climate change, which is a negative, but also recognizes cost-benefit analyses regarding policy around it, something entirely absent elsewhere on the left with a sense of reasonable compromise. He favors ending the open border which all by itself is a recognition of reality. He escapes the "dynasty" charge for being a scion of a famous political family, by having been publicly derided by some of them. One can see why he's attractive, not just for those reasons but also because he comes off as very nice, refusing to get into ad hominem personal attacks on even Republicans as well as Democrats, and is a fitness buff to boot, always an extra plus.
Polls show he has the support of as much as 30% of Democrats, and that isn't all that surprising. Having gone to the Democrat Convention of 2008 in Denver, I got to meet a lot of Democrats, nice Democrats, from places like Colorado and Illinois, and Vermont and upstate New York and yeah, they were genuinely moderate. (Some, with a little tweaking, would make pretty good Republicans, actually). Someone like Kennedy could easily peel away a lot of these voters, and if not a lot of them, a few of them, which from Joe Biden's point of view, would be just as bad. That's because he can't afford to lose any of them. He's five to ten points down in the polls with President Trump with Democrats in turmoil and Election Day is coming fast.
I think it could be a lot of them though -- and as Kennedy notes in his statement, he seeks a new way of running, because the obvious problem for him is that Democrats rig elections, pulling dirty tricks not just on Republicans but on their fellow Democrats who get in their way. Their rigging and cheating of Bernie Sanders of the nomination in the last two elections is Exhibit A. In 2020, Bernie had all kinds of support and appeared to headed to the nomination, but was suddenly rigged out of it when all significant Democrats dropped out of their race at once and suddenly united behind Joe Biden as of Super Tuesday. They also conducted under-the-table rigging that has since been exposed to deny him the nomination and this can't have been lost on Kennedy.
That's what a party gets -- and deserves, when it blandly and nakedly engages in cheating.
The Bidenites are gaslighting to the public that Kennedy is an insignificant candidate and nothing to be concerned about, but that's belied by Joe Biden's spiteful and dangerous reponse to Kennedy's candidacy: By refusing to extend to him Secret Service protection, despite his heightened risk profile, with both a father and an uncle gunned down by assassins in the 1960s, and a long list of documented weirdos extending threat to Kennedy that the Secret Service already knows about -- the New York Post has a list of the known threats here. And, there has already been at least one incident from these would-be assassins, who was intercepted by Kennedy's private security guards.
Big support. Family history. Weirdos on the march. Known attempts. And Joe Biden, who's never met a dollar he didn't want to spend, won't extend Secret Service protection to a man who's uniquely vulnerable to assassins? That's evil.
If it's such a non-threat, why the spiteful response from Biden? It all goes to confirm that Joe Biden has a nightmare on his hands and is lashing out in the vicious way that comes natural to him. With Trump, coordinated kitchen-sink prosecutions. With RFK, a mysterious unwillingness to extend to him basic routine safety. His vicious dog is an indicator of his vicious master.
But Kennedy has support and enough people who agree with him to make a difference. It's good he's doing this and he should be treated with respect. Let's hope that with President Trump's strength in the polls, that's enough to take Biden down and propel Trump to victory.
Image: Daniel Schwen, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0
