He's Running Hard

 

                                               is there a way he can team up with Trump?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — in his first event as a presidential candidate in a state where his family has storied roots — painted a dark metaphor Monday outside Annapolis.

Amid a long, at times meandering speech filled with statistics and history about what he considers the “corrupt merger of state and corporate power,” he said the powerful have created a wall between themselves and working Americans.

“What I’m going to do over the next 12 months and over the eight years of my presidency,” Kennedy said, pausing for applause from a few hundred supporters, “is I’m going to lead the attack on the wall. And we’re going to go over and take our country back.”

Kennedy, whose father was U.S. Sen. and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and whose uncle was President John F. Kennedy, left the Democratic Party of his dynastic family last month to run instead as an independent candidate for president.

Beginning a nationwide initiative to get his name onto the ballot in every state, he appeared at Vibe in Anne Arundel County. About 700 people filled the live music and events venue, passing around signature-gathering documents and showcasing “Kennedy for President” hats, signs and shirts they bought at the door.

“This is very doable, but I can’t do it alone,” Kennedy said toward the end of his nearly hourlong speech, which was followed by a Q&A and selfie line with anyone who wanted a photo.

Kennedy’s campaign has been widely panned by the major parties and even prominent members of his own family.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his sister who served two terms as lieutenant governor under Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening from 1995 to 2003, joined three of her siblings last month in saying their brother’s candidacy was “dangerous.” They said Kennedy “might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment.”

Kennedy, in an interview with The Baltimore Sun after the event Monday, said he loves his family and many of them have ties to President Joe Biden, so he understands his campaign “causes discomfort.”

He said he feels “very connected” to Maryland — from his childhood schooling in Bethesda, his time campaigning for his sister, and his legal work to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River, among other bodies of water.

And despite Biden’s major victory over former President Donald Trump and Democrats dominating the rest of state politics, Kennedy said he thinks he has a chance.

“People are not convinced when President Biden says that he’s brought prosperity to the state of Maryland. They feel like they’re being gaslighted,” Kennedy said in the interview. “What I’m finding out, being six months out of talking to Americans [while campaigning], is that a lot of people want something different and they’re tired of the division.”

A former environmental lawyer, Kennedy has for most of the past two decades used his platform to spread what scientists say is misinformation about vaccines and public health initiatives, including the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.

In his presidential campaign, he’s appeared often on conservative media, criticizing the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine and its southern border policies. He’s said he wants to significantly reduce military spending to invest in domestic programs. 

Kennedy touched on all that and more Monday in his speech, saying aid to Ukraine and money paid to government contractors for a wide range of domestic issues was “strip-mining the wealth from our people, from our American middle class, which is suffering, which is deteriorating, which is disintegrating.”

In targeting both Biden’s and Trump’s policies on everything from mitigating COVID-19 to the economy, homelessness and the opioid epidemic, Kennedy routinely returned to his idea that corporate America was controlling much of Americans’ lives.

“We’re going from a nation of citizens to a nation of subjects,” Kennedy said.

While Kennedy’s independent bid gives him a better chance to appear on next year’s November general election ballots, any candidate outside the two major parties will face some significant historical headwinds.

No independent candidate since Ross Perot in 1992 — who took a fifth of the popular vote but didn’t earn a single Electoral College vote — has garnered any momentum in a presidential race.

Perot secured 14% and 6.5% of the vote in Maryland in 1992 and 1996, respectively, but Democrats have handily won Maryland in every election since George H.W. Bush was the last Republican to win statewide, in 1988.

Biden’s win in 2020 was the high-water mark so far for Democrats. His 65% share of the vote, with nearly 2 million votes, was 33 percentage points more than Trump’s in Maryland.

Those figures were nearly identical two years later, when Republican Dan Cox lost the governor’s race to Democrat Wes Moore after running a campaign that was endorsed by Trump.

Cox’s campaign was dominated by his post-COVID 19 platform that criticized vaccine mandates and government shutdowns of schools and businesses.

Kennedy has similarly railed against those ideas and his campaign has already drawn like-minded Marylanders.

“During the COVID debacle we all went through, he was one of the few people who was speaking out for medical freedom,” said Nat Semple, 44, of Arnold.

Semple, who said he voted for Trump twice, said he worked for a federal government contractor during the pandemic and was disappointed with the government and general societal push for vaccines, which he decided not to take after he contracted COVID and had mild symptoms.

Charlene Beairsto, 55, of Bowie, said she was backing Kennedy because she was against “medical tyranny.” She said her son was required to get a COVID-19 vaccine during college in Massachusetts.

“I am proud that he has made the democracy wheels turn again and has thrown a spirit of generosity back into the American lexicon,” Beairsto said while holding a toy horse head that she said was named after Paul Revere to represent “the spirit of truth in the Americas again.”

“He’s concerned about children and just honest reporting of facts,” said Celine Dellinger, 36, of Kensington.

Others in attendance Monday came out of curiosity.

“I just wanted to see a Kennedy,” said Kyle McDermott, a 32-year-old from Baltimore who said he considers himself politically independent but doesn’t think an independent candidate can win a general election.

Still a year away from Election Day, pollsters have not yet routinely included Kennedy in surveys of a potential Trump-Biden rematch.

However, a national poll of registered voters from Quinnipiac University released Nov. 1showed Kennedy collecting 22% of the vote in a hypothetical three-way race with him, Trump and Biden, who earned 36%and 39%, respectively. A two-way race with Trump and Biden showed a “virtual dead heat,” with Trump winning 46% and Biden winning 47%, according to the poll.