Is Biden all that immune to the challenge of antivaxer Robert F Kennedy Jr ? (2024)

Standing in a reconstruction of Bobby Kennedy’s office from his time as attorney-general, visitors scoff at the idea that his son can become the latest member of America’s most celebrated political family to challenge for the White House.

Like the room at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, Robert F Kennedy Jr does not quite resemble the original.

His father was a champion of civil rights and the poor, who fought organised crime, helped steer his brother through the Cuban missile crisis and was a hero to much of the mainstream Democratic Party even before his assassination while running for president in 1968 turned him into a symbol of lost potential.

In contrast, Kennedy Jr has been dismissed as a crank, a wacko and a weirdo, but in April the 69-year-old environmental lawyer confirmed that he was challenging President Biden, 80, for next year’s Democratic nomination. This is the fourth time a member of the Kennedy clan has sought the top job. Two months later, his candidacy is becoming a growing problem for Biden, much as his father Bobby and later his Uncle Ted weakened the re-election prospects of two Democratic presidents in a previous era.

Kennedy Jr is an anti-vaccine campaigner who most recently was a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland,” he said at an event last year. “You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologised.

He has argued that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is really a “US war against Russia” in which ”the Russians have repeatedly offered to settle”. He is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the killings of his father and his uncle John were the work of the CIA.

“He’s just not viable,” said Mary Lynn Davis-Ajami, a professor of nursing, visiting the library with her grandson. “Some of his positions, especially on vaccinations, are off centre. But I think brand recognition is a powerful thing and the Kennedy name is still strong. Not everyone is necessarily informed on his political views. There is a bell curve with outliers, and he is definitely one of those outliers.

Yet surveys show that Kennedy Jr has found a constituency. A poll for Big Village, a research company, showed he had support among 18 per cent of grassroots Democrat members in a survey conducted last week. (Biden was at 60 per cent with the third candidate, Marianne Williamson, a self-help author, at 11 per cent).

In some polls Kennedy Jr has hit 20 per cent, more than Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida touted as Donald Trump’s closest rival for the Republican nomination, scored in a Morning Consult poll of Republican voters last week, albeit in a much more crowded field.

A quirk of next year’s primary elections means that Kennedy Jr could win the first two states to pick their Democratic nominee even if he does not close the gap on the president. Biden has insisted on a change to tradition by allowing South Carolina, a southern state, to be the first to choose its Democrat candidate. If the regular frontrunners, Iowa and New Hampshire, ignore the president and stage their votes first, Biden may not contest them.

Were Kennedy Jr to win both states it would generate momentum that could keep his challenge alive for longer than the Biden team might have hoped and make a contest out of what should be a one-horse race.

Kennedy Jr’s candidacy has attracted support and funding from wealthy donors in Silicon Valley. Earlier this month, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, endorsed him, while David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, rich West Coast venture capitalists, have held a fundraiser for him in San Francisco.

“Certainly his last name, his first name also, affords him a certain recognition,” said Brett Bruen, a former US diplomat who worked in the Obama White House. “I don’t think that will carry him much beyond where he is now, but there are not many options for Democrats.

“He is a reflection quite frankly of the desperation that exists in some parts of the party that we don’t have alternatives to the president.”

Biden will be almost 82 by the time of next year’s election, and, should he serve a full second term, would retire at 86.

Some in the party fear that voters, fearful that Biden could become incapacitated, will reject the party. The appetite for Kamala Harris, the vice-president, to inherit the Oval Office is almost non-existent.

It has not been the done thing to challenge a sitting Democratic president for the party nomination since Ted Kennedy, John and Robert’s brother and Kennedy Jr’s uncle, decided that Jimmy Carter was too weak to beat Ronald Reagan in 1980.

He proved to be right, with Reagan winning by a landslide, but the battle for the Democratic nomination, which Carter eventually won, splintered the party and it would be another 12 years before Bill Clinton wrestled back the White House from the Republicans.

In 1968 Eugene McCarthy was running as a Democratic primary challenger against the incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, when Bobby Kennedy entered the race. Days later Johnson, who hated and was hated by Kennedy, stunned the nation by withdrawing.

Kennedy Jr’s growing popularity in a nervous party has not gone unnoticed.

Gavin Newsom, 55, the California governor, has been building a national profile for at least a year, notably by goading DeSantis. Other governors, including Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have done little to damp reports that they, one day, see themselves running for president.

“RFK Jr is probably hitting the ceiling of his popularity,” said Bruen. “I do think there are active conversations taking place among some Democrat governors who at the very least want to be ready should something happen to Biden and they want to have their people primed. They want to have the foundations laid because it will be a very condensed time period.

“It’s not by chance that Gavin Newsom is out challenging Ron DeSantis to a debate. There is a subtle competition going on for who will be the next leader of the Democrats, and potentially even the emergency option.”

DeSantis, while still having a lot of ground to catch up on Trump, 77, believes that Newsom is a rival, whether in this election or a future one.

“Stop puss*footing around,” DeSantis said last week in comments addressed to the California governor.

“Are you going to throw your hat in the ring and challenge Joe? Or are you going to sit on the sidelines and chirp? Why don’t you throw your hat in the ring?”

In 2013 Barbara Bush, the matriarch of another American dynasty, poured cold water on the idea that Jeb Bush, her son and brother of George W, could become the third in that bloodline to run for the presidency.

“I think it’s a great country, there are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever,” she said. “There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes.” He ignored her advice and was dismantled by Trump.

The Kennedy clan has offered a similar lack of encouragement to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign, which threatens to embarrass his nephew Joe Kennedy, Biden’s envoy to Northern Ireland, and his cousin Caroline, who is ambassador to Australia.

Kennedy Jr picked Boston to launch his campaign, despite never living in the city. “My whole family, including myself, have long personal relationships with President Biden,” he said soon afterwards. “And many of them just plain disagree with me on issues like censorship and war and public health. They are entitled to their beliefs . . . and I love them back.”

Love him they may, but they are also cross with him. Unlike other members of his immediate family, he has campaigned for the release from prison of Sirhan Sirhan, his father’s assassin, and his views on vaccines have been denounced by some of his closest relatives as “tragically wrong”.

“This is a difficult situation for me,” Rory Kennedy, a filmmaker and youngest child of Robert F Kennedy, told CNN recently. “I love my older brother Bobby. He has extraordinary charisma and is a very gifted speaker. I admire his past work as an environmentalist . . . But due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.”