What Impact will Robert F Kennedy Jr have on the 2024 US Presidential Race?

Charles Kriel examines the appeal of the conspiracy-embracing presidential candidate who also happens to be a Democrat and a defender of civil rights.

Photo: WENN Rights Ltd /Alamy 

American Presidential campaigns seem to begin sooner with each cycle, and this week, seventeen months out from election day, candidates are already pitching gutter rhetoric and sky-scraping levels of disinformation.

Anthony Fauci promoted "a historic coup d'état”.

Vaccine mandates “make you a slave”.

Black children are at higher risk than white children of contracting autism from COVID vaccines.

Toxic chemical exposure castrates young men, creating gender “dysphoria”.

After suffering nearly a decade of the political Trump, a certain exhaustion comes with the firehose of nonsense from the MAGA right. But these aren’t the declarations of the presumed Republican candidate; they’re in fact the claims of a scion of America’s most esteemed Democratic family — Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy announced his candidacy for President earlier this year to a generally ho-hum reception — after all, who beats a sitting president in a primary? But his radical positioning on divisive issues have thrust him into the bright glare of the scrolling news cycle.

YouTube this week had to remove his interview with Jordan Peterson for his anti-vax views, after Kennedy temporarily lost his Instagram account in 2021 for the same.

But Kennedy also has his social media supporters. In a podcast with Russell Brand, who has made a career of political clowning, Kennedy explained why America should be blamed for Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

Elon Musk also recently hosted Kennedy for a two-and-a-half-hour Twitter Spaces interview, where he then claimed anti-depressants are responsible for the rise in school shootings. He also took questions from “anti-woke” author Michael Shellenberger (who just wrapped a triple act with Brand and Matt Taibbi in Westminster). During the Musk interview, Kennedy promoted the idea that labs around the world were developing “ethnic bioweapons that kill people from certain races”. He also said COVID is a bioweapons issue.

Despite these wild ideas, Kennedy polls high with Democrats. His support hovers around 20%. Surprising, but the numbers of America’s unvaccinated belie the assumption you can’t beat a sitting president in a primary.

According to the San Francisco health polling group KFF, as of March 2023, 9% of Democrats and 26% of Independents are unvaccinated. The same poll says 24% of Black people and 26% of Hispanic people aren’t vaccinated, and a whopping one third – 34% – of Republicans won’t be getting the jab.

COVID devastated America’s minorities. 56% of Black people and 52% of Hispanic people report the pandemic “has had a negative impact on their ability to pay for basic necessities”. Yet, minorities are more likely to resist vaccination. This could be for several reasons. In our research for our disinformation documentary Dis/Informed – which features Kennedy and his own film, Medical Racism: the New Apartheid – we found that many in America’s poorer communities feared the vaccine would make them sick, and they simply couldn’t afford to take time from work in a country that doesn’t guarantee sick pay.

Trust in Government also stands as a fundamental issue. Who would blame members of the African American community for believing there are unseen forces conspiring to hold them back, whether through oppression, lack of opportunity, or a virus and its vaccine?

And in so doing, black voters might find themselves unsurprisingly aligned with a conspiracy-embracing presidential candidate who also happens to be a Democrat and a defender of civil rights — Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy comes by his conspiratorial thinking legitimately. He is the nephew of President John F Kennedy, and, according to Junior, his father Attorney General “Bobby” Kennedy often declared his certainty that a second shooter was involved in JFK’s assassination. Bobby Kennedy Sr was in turn murdered by Sirhan Sirhan, and Robert Jr has declared many times his wish for the reopening of that investigation.

Tragedy vies with fame and power to write the Kennedys’ storied legend. Who would be surprised if he leaned into conspiratorial thinking?

In a family swept through by such winds of chaos, surely the thought that somewhere there is order — somewhere someone is deciding these things and they’re not just random acts of horror — surely that promise must appeal. A waiter with a weapon killed your father and destroyed your life? No. Better a shadow conspiracy.

Your uncle was murdered with a spectacular sniper shot unachievable by a former soldier who at the height of the Cold War once attempted defection to Russia? No, surely the security services must have pulled the trigger.

Speculation, of course, but the very attraction of conspiracy theory is its promise of order over chaos. Conspiracy is comforting. Who really wants to believe another pandemic might lurk around the corner of this damnable decade, just because some bastard ate a bat for breakfast?

With 34% of Republicans, 26% of Independents and 9% of Democrats steeped in social media disinformation and vaccine-hesitant, America now faces the prospect of a conspiracy-touting, vaccine-sceptic Democratic candidate with a stellar environmental record and an image as a defender of civil rights.

Not to mention that the other would-be conspiracist in chief, Donald Trump, leads Joe Biden in a Rasmussen poll by a six-point margin despite an indictment on federal charges.

No one believes Robert F Kennedy Jr will become president. Yet by virtue of his name Kennedy already disrupts the Democratic establishment, polling 20% of the vote.

When I was growing up in Alabama in the 1970s, nearly all my black friends’ houses featured a JFK/RFK/MLK triptych. John, Bobby and Martin. All perceived defenders of civil rights. All brought down by an assassin’s bullet. All their deaths surrounded by conspiracy. This powerful and iconic image of martyrdom, mystery and betrayal lives in the back of many African American minds just as surely as every Brit can hear the voice of Winston Churchill in their ears.

In this that promises to be one of the most important and yet simultaneously bizarre elections in our lifetime, Kennedy – even more than 2020’s Bernie Sanders – has the unique advantage of pulling the vote of African Americans, a poorly-served demographic that could shift any swing state, as well as the election at large.

Minority and underprivileged American communities are notoriously time poor and information impoverished. Kennedy’s supporters are unlikely to realize him for what he truly is — Joe Rogan’s darling, supported as the chaos candidate by the Steve Bannon-Mike Flynn-Roger Stone set. The Ratfuckers.

Does Kennedy, with his storied name, care?

It reminds me of my late friend John Perry Barlow — a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a friend of John F Kennedy Jr.

John Jr, an amateur pilot, was preparing to fly a light aircraft to the wedding of his cousin, RFK Jr’s sister. I can still hear Barlow’s voice when he told me that before John Jr. took off, he said to him, “You know just enough to be dangerous. You have confidence in the air, which could harm you.”

Kennedy never made it to the wedding. Flying over dark waters at night, with no marker by which to orient himself beyond his own confidence, he became disoriented and lost control of the aircraft. John Jr died in the crash, along with his wife and her sister.

Ambition, hubris and the Kennedys are natural bedfellows, and RFK Jr is unlikely to care about the destruction he will surely wield against Joe Biden’s campaign.

To paraphrase Logan Roy, “Robert F Kennedy Jr is not a serious person”. But like many deranged and unstable leaders, given a global platform, he is dangerous.

Will he win? No.

Like Trump before him, of course he won’t.

Until he does.

Dr Charles Kriel is a disinformation specialist and co-director of two documentaries – Data and Disinformation: Investigating Cambridge Analytica (aka People You May Know), and The Disinformation Age (aka Dis/Informed). He was Specialist Advisor to the UK Commons Committee on Disinformation, and the Lords Committee on the Online Safety Bill.